The Girl with Ghost Eyes (18 page)

“Mr. Yanqiu, why would you bring me to an alley full of ghosts and goblins? I can’t perform such a massive exorcism.”

The eyeball laughed. “What makes you think you need to exorcise them?”

“It’s what I do,” I said. “What I must do.”

“What you must do is stop Liu Qiang from creating a Kulou-Yuanling,” he said. “Look around you, Li-lin. You might find something that can help.”

I scowled. “Anything I find here I will have to buy, at the cost of consorting with spirits. Any agreements I enter into will move me further out of the human social order. I have no wish to become one more freak of the spirit world.”

Mr. Yanqiu was quiet. I imagined his lips would be pursed if he had any. I sighed. I hadn’t meant to insult the eyeball.

I looked up and saw an old woman walking toward me down the alley. She was wearing a large cloak. There were
things
moving beneath the cloak, where her body should have been. Jagged shapes pushed out against the cloak, darting like knives or shards of glass beneath the fabric. And I saw, bulbous and protruding in the woman’s forehead, a third eye.

The crone stepped closer. Her head was crooked on her neck, as though someone had taken a statue apart and put the pieces back together at the wrong angles. She smiled at me from a mouth that had no teeth, her beaklike nose twitching. There was a sparkle in her dark beady eyes, all three of them. She said, in a voice of laughter and grief, “Xian Li-lin.”

I could only gape. I knew that voice. I’d known it for years.

“Jiujiu?”

“Aah!” the old woman said, the sad and laughing voice of a seagull cackling from the old lady’s mouth. “Aah!”

“Jiujiu, you … What are you …” I couldn’t figure out what I should say. I had known this bird lady for most of my life, but I’d only ever seen her in the shape of a seagull. I wasn’t even aware that Jiujiu had any other forms.

“Here,” she said, “Aah! Here to bargain.”

“Bargain? What for?”

“Protection, Xian Li-lin. The Haiou Shen need a protector.”

I gazed at the three-eyed old woman. Spirit gulls can see the future, so it could be important to find out what she meant. “Protection from what?”

“Aah!” the old woman said. “Those who will come.”

“And who are they, Jiujiu?”

Her head went further awry on her not-quite-human neck. “Those who come, Xian Li-lin,” she repeated. “The Haiou Shen would bargain with you, aah!”

I tried not to let my surprise show. The gull spirits had always come to warn me of their own accord. Now Jiujiu was trying to make some sort of deal with me. I didn’t understand what had changed. “What kind of bargain do you have in mind?”

“Bones are swirling in the world of spirits, Xian Li-lin,” the old lady said, “click clack, go the bones of a never-was, aah! You will need us when the bones grow hungry.”

“Bones,” I repeated. “Skeletons. You’re talking about the Kulou-Yuanling.”

“Aah! Aah!” the old woman shouted. “Protect us, Xian Li-lin, and we will follow you.”

Mr. Yanqiu spoke from my shoulder. “What do you mean when you say you’ll follow her?”

“Aah! The Haiou Shen will be your soldiers, Xian Li-lin. Protect us, lead us, we will follow you.”

“Protect you from what?” Mr. Yanqiu asked.

The old lady scowled. “From those who will come, aah!” she said. “Already said so, didn’t we.”

“How long?” I asked. “How long must I protect you if I agree?”

“From the time of ten suns to the time of none. Aah! Aah!”

I blinked. In the early days of the world, in primordial times, there had been ten suns. Archer Yi slew nine of them, leaving only one sun in the sky.

Mr. Yanqiu shook his eyeball. “Don’t do it, Li-lin. They want you to be their guardian for all time, and in exchange for that, all you’ll be able to do is lead some seagulls into battle.”

“Spirit soldiers,” I said to him. “I can still ask the Xie Liang tong for their help, and then I would have men and spirits at my back.”

“That’s some army you’re building there,” the eyeball spirit said. “I’m sure Liu Qiang will quake in terror when he sees you’ve recruited the help of seagulls and undisciplined gangsters.”

I grinned. “How could we lose?”

“They’re
birds
, Li-lin,” said Mr. Yanqiu, a frown distinct in his voice. “They’re just birds.”

“Aaah!” cried Jiujiu. “Such an insult, from just an eye.”

“Enough,” I told the both of them. They settled into quiet sulking. I turned to face Jiujiu. “Long ago, you and I hid together at the bottom of a well. Back then neither of us could protect, neither of us could fight, so we hid. But there will be no more hiding. If you will follow me, I will protect you.”

Mr. Yanqiu sighed. “You accept the bargain, Xian Li-lin?” Jiujiu asked.

“I accept the bargain,” I said. “How do we seal the agreement?”

The old lady reached inside her shifting cloak and took out a rectangular piece of blue paper. She handed the paper to me. It was blank.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

Then Jiujiu drew back her cloak. Gulls flew out. There was a noise of wings, and the birds poured forth by dozens, and then by flying hundreds, a raucous crowd of white and blue-gray feathers. The three-eyed gulls kept coming, more than could ever possibly fit beneath the cloak. They flew up to the sky, circling in the bruise-dark night, and they kept coming.

Up and down the lane, the monsters had paused their business to watch the spirit gulls fly out from the cloak and form a cloud in the sky. Bird by bird they came forth, flapping innumerable wings, and I gaped watching their flight.

It seemed to last for minutes, the skyward procession of the gulls, and then the cloak crumpled to the ground, empty.

The stars were no longer visible. All that could be seen was the dark of stormclouds, a storm of birds, and then the gulls rained down.

Down from the sky they flew, and right at me. The first three-eyed seagull came at me with such speed that I flinched, but with the sound of wings it flew against the blue paper in my hand and vanished.

The bird was just gone. “What was that?” I said, mystified.

And then the next gull flew against the paper and was gone, and the next, and the next. The flock of them had blackened the sky, and all streamed now toward the blue paper, vanishing when they touched it.

At last, eventually, the wings were silent. There were no more gulls to be seen.

“Okay,
that
was impressive,” said Mr. Yanqiu.

I looked at the blue paper in my hand. It was no longer blank. In row after orderly row, small birds had been stamped in black ink. “A talisman,” I said. There was a blank space at the bottom for me to sign it with my name and lineage.

Staring at it, I began to realize what I’d done. I’d made a bargain without taking the time to understand it. I had agreed to protect the spirit gulls, without even knowing what I was supposed to protect them from. There would be consequences, and I couldn’t even guess what they might be.

I became aware of something. A silence up and down the alley. Raising my eyes from the blue paper talisman, I saw them, all of them. The strange monsters that had business on Ghost Market had watched the flight of the Haiou Shen, and now they were watching me. All of them.

The man circled by bats. The dream eater. A man’s head the size of a man. A red pear with a man’s face. A white ape standing on one hand and one foot, its head to the side. All of them, an alley thronged with ghosts and goblins, and every freakish eye was watching me. I was terrified. I wanted to crouch down and make myself small, I wanted to apologize for having offered offense. I tried not to let the spirits see me shaking.

One of them moved toward me. He looked like a man with no eyes in his face, but he didn’t have empty eye sockets. There was just a blank stretch of skin where most men have eyes.

“Is he blind?” I asked Mr. Yanqiu, and then the man held up
his hands.

The gesture was one I’d ordinarily associate with peace, since open hands do not carry weapons. But on the palm of each of this man’s hands, he had an eye.

I blinked, and the eyes on his palms blinked back.

The weirdness of the spirit bewildered me, made me feel dizzy, as I stared into the man’s palms and the palms stared back. It was as if a man had been mutilated, his body parts rearranged, and between the disorientation and the disgust, I felt as though I might vomit.

“It’s one of them,” the man with eyes in his palms said, his voice slow but clear. “A person. One of the living.”

I heard breaths drawn all around me. There was hissing, and something growled, low and guttural.

A tall man with a frog’s head walked toward me. “It shouldn’t be here,” he said, shaking his froggy head. “It doesn’t belong here.”

I do not hide from monsters. By reflex I reached for my peachwood sword and began to draw it out of my belt, but then I glimpsed the eyeball on my shoulder. It was an odd little monster, and it was also my friend. Perhaps I had choices aside from hiding and fighting.

It wasn’t easy to push my sword back down into my belt. My pulses were racing. I turned to face the frog-headed man, and opened my hands to show I carried no weapons.

“This is Ghost Market,” I said. “Where the world of spirits borders upon the world of men.”

The bulge on the frog-man’s neck inflated and deflated before it spoke. “What of it?” it asked. “You belong in the world of men.”

“Do I? I have yin eyes, and I have seen and talked with spirits since I was a small girl.”

The eyes protruding from his frog head seemed to widen at that. He glanced at me for a moment that stretched on and on. “You have killed spirits,” he said at last.

“Yes,” I said, looking down. And suddenly I felt ashamed of myself, of my life. I felt justified for killing some of the spirits; they had threatened human lives, and I’d had no choice but to destroy them. But there were others I could have appeased, or driven away, or made more of an effort to understand.

The frog man watched me, and I thought I saw a form of sympathy on his face. “You shouldn’t be here,” he said, more gently now. “You belong in the world of living men, not the world of ghosts and goblins. Why don’t you go home now.”

“Yes,” I said with a nod. I turned back toward the alley’s entryway and began to walk away.

“He’s right, you know,” Mr. Yanqiu said from my shoulder. “You belong among your own kind.”

I stopped walking. “And what about you?”

“What do you mean, Li-lin?”

“Shouldn’t you be with your kind, Mr. Yanqiu?”

He huffed. “I should be with you,” he said.

I looked at him for a long moment, then lifted him off my shoulder with one hand. “Li-lin!” he cried. “What are you doing?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Yanqiu,” I said, as I placed him on the ground. “Father wants me to destroy you. Here in Ghost Market I don’t have to.”

“What do you mean?” Mr. Yanqiu yelled, shaking his hands. “What are you saying?” Tears began to flow from his face. The teardrops were the size of his hands.

“I can exorcise you here, in Ghost Market,” I said, taking out a paper talisman, “and you won’t die. You will no longer intrude upon the human social order, and yet you’ll be able to go on living here, among your kind.”

“Li-lin, please! I’m begging you. Please don’t do this.”

Inside me I felt a barren space grow wide. It threatened to make me break down in tears, but there was no doubt in my mind. By exorcising Mr. Yanqiu here, in Ghost Market, I could honor my father’s wishes without doing harm to Mr. Yanqiu. It was the best of possible outcomes.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I lit the talisman of exorcism on fire.

18

In dreams I ran through fields and forests on the strong legs of an animal. My paws touched down and I sprang forward with a kind of fundamental joy. The air carried the smells of danger and the smells of meat, and often they were the same smell. My fur bristled.

Something growled and I realized it was me. My voice. A fierce pride went through me. I swished my tail. Flexed my claws. Climbed over stones. Padded over earth. Water made me cautious. Hunger made me mad.

The new blue ghost made me mad too. Hovering by my shoulder. Telling me to kill.

The new ghost made me dream what he wanted me to dream. Dream of men. Their taste, their meat, their blood. “Find people,” the blue ghost said. “Kill them.”

A man moved between trees. “Kill him!” the blue ghost said. “Tear him apart.”

I growled at the blue ghost, but I felt it course through me. The bloodlust. The kill hunger. “Kill him, kill him, kill him,” the blue ghost said.

The man ran from me. Ran like a frightened little mouse. It was too much. I leapt into action. Hunted him, caught him, killed him. Ate. I was sated and happy. I licked the warm wet sticky stuff from my paws. His ribs had a lot of meat on them. I chewed and licked and chewed.

A new ghost stood up. Looked at his hands. Shivered.

The blue ghost was gone. I chewed the flesh from the dead man’s bones. “What is happening?” the new ghost said.

I licked my chops, in my dream. I knew nothing would change. The new ghost would be my blue ghost now. He was the freshest soul of the human meat, so he would follow. He was going to hover by me, following me like another tail. He’d talk to me. He’d speed my blood. Urge me to kill. Kill kill kill, he would say. Always the same.

“Kill,” he said. “Kill kill kill.”

Days sped forward in my dream, became weeks, weeks became months. Then blood wet my claws again, human meat died screaming, and a new ghost came. But there was something strange about this new ghost. He was different.

I was dreaming. Light streamed through the trees, and it was a wrong light. It was the light through windows, through closed eyelids. I wasn’t a tiger.

“Hush,” a man’s voice said. “Go back to sleep.”

I licked blood from my paw. The new ghost looked at me. He was different. No hair.

His meat was lean. I chewed his corpse, swallowed the chunks of man, and his ghost watched me. His blue face was smiling.

I prowled through the woods in my dream. The new blue ghost talked. Blue ghosts always talk. They always say, kill. Kill, kill, kill. Kill someone else so I can be free, they always say.