“Hey, Melina.” He stood up when I walked out the door. He was a lot taller than me now. When he and his mom had moved in, we’d been eye to eye. Now we were more like eye to Adam’s apple.
“Hey, Ben,” I answered.
I watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down a couple of times. “So are you headed over to the dojo?” he finally spit out.
“Not right now.” I hadn’t known it was possible to look both relieved and wildly anxious at the same time before. Ben sighed and sat back down.
I sat down next to him. “You’ve been seeing a lot of Sophie.” I said it just like that. Like a fact. Which is what it was. I figured the only reason he wanted to go to he dojo was to see her. I wasn’t born yesterday.
“Yep.” Ben leaned back. “I have.”
“I’m not sure that’s such a great idea.”
His eyes narrowed. “Well, I do.”
“Ben, you don’t understand what you’re getting into here.”
He slumped lower.
“There are things going on in Sophie’s life right now that you can’t possibly understand.” Seriously, Sophie didn’t understand what an incredible U-turn her life had just taken, but I did. She might have thought her chances of having a normal adolescence disappeared into the car wreck she’d survived, but she had no idea how much weirder things were going to get now that she’d been called to be a Messenger.
There wasn’t going to be any junior prom or homecoming dances for her. There weren’t going to be any of the normal teenaged coming-of-age rituals. For crying out loud, I’d taken my driving test with an angry pixie buzzing in the backseat. The examiner had kept turning around, trying to find the bee he was sure was in the car. When he couldn’t find it, he almost flunked me for having a car that wasn’t up to standard.
I’d tried to do some of those things and had finally given up after having to explain one too many times some weird happening. Too many eyes had stared at me. It was too easy to become conspicuous, something I couldn’t afford to do and that Sophie wasn’t going to be able to afford to do either.
Ben could, though. Sure, he’d already painted himself into a corner with the bad-boy behavior at the high school, but that wouldn’t last much longer. Contrary to how it feels at the time, high school does not last forever; he’d be able to start over with a clean slate someplace new.
Unless he kept hanging out with Sophie.
“Sophie’s different,” I started, trying to figure out how to explain some of this to Ben without explaining too much or even just enough that he’d decide I was completely loony tunes and needed to be locked up.
“I get that,” he interrupted. “That’s why I like her. She’s different. She’s not like anybody else. Why would I want to be with someone who’s like everybody else when I can be with someone special?”
And for that, I had no answer.
I TRIED THE FRONT DOOR OF THE TEMPLE AND GOT NO JOY. IT was securely locked. I probably could have busted it in, but discretion is the better part of valor and I didn’t want my presence to be that obvious to anyone. Yet.
I wasn’t sure what strategy I was going to need to take. I’d leave bursting in, guns blazing, causing shock and awe for a later date if I needed it. I’ve never actually done shock and awe. I’m more of a quick-kick-to-the-kneecap-and-then-hightail-it-away-from-danger kind of gal, but this whole situation was taking me entirely out of my element. Who knew what would be next? I might start wearing pink and lime green, and, of course, unicorns might fly.
I ducked around to my favorite Dumpster in back. I was surprised that it didn’t smell worse. I peeked inside. It was nearly empty, just like last time.
Undead men apparently didn’t make much garbage.
I retraced the same route I’d taken a few nights before, but dispensed with the part where I ducked behind the file cabinet. I wanted to be found today. I wanted to have a little chat with the frightened young man in the orange robe.
I found him downstairs, sitting in the lotus position in front of the altar. He’d changed out the oranges, for which I was grateful, but the incense he burned made me want to sneeze.
I saw the slightest twitch of the fingers of his right hand. The rest of him didn’t move, however. I was pretty sure he knew I was there. The twitch was what poker players would call a tell, a little something he did that gave himself away. He probably wasn’t even aware that he’d done it.
I settled down on the floor a few yards away to wait. I didn’t know much about Taoist prayers, but I figured it would be more respectful not to interrupt. Whatever he was doing, it didn’t take long to finish. He untucked his legs and stood up in one fluid movement, not such an easy thing to do after sitting in lotus position for a while. I’m pretty limber, but the side of my right foot always ends up going to sleep when I sit like that, and then I tip like a chair with a short leg when I stand up.
“Get out,” he said.
I’ll admit, I’m not always greeted with open arms wherever I go. Sometimes people don’t want the messages I’m delivering or the gifts that I’ve brought them. Sometimes people take it out on the Messenger, although everyone knows how patently unfair that is. Still, they generally wait for me to get a word out before they tell me to leave.
“Nice to see you, too,” I said, always ready with a witty comeback.
“Please, Ms. Markowitz, just go. It will be safer for you. It will be safer for me. It will be better for everyone.” There was a note of desperation in his voice. He almost sounded as if he was pleading.
“How do you know my name?” I asked. I was reasonably sure I hadn’t handed over an engraved business card to anyone at this point.
He shook his head. “These are smart men you are dealing with. They have ways of finding things out. They have ways of knowing things. They’ll know you’ve been here, for instance, and someone will suffer for it.”
My stomach turned. “The way you said Frank Liu suffered? To send me a warning?”
He nodded.
My first instinct was to run. If this guy didn’t want me to help, then what the hell was I doing here? Maybe Aldo was right. This wasn’t our problem. Then I thought of Maricela, the way her still body had lain against the pillow, so tiny that she almost hadn’t made a dent. If that wasn’t everyone’s problem, I didn’t know what was.
“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t let this continue.”
He turned and walked away from me. “You have no control over this situation. Any involvement from you can only make things worse. It already has made things worse.”
“It’s going to keep getting worse unless we stop it,” I said. I wasn’t sure of much, but I was sure of that. These men would keep on pushing until they demolished whatever was blocking their path. They had to be stopped, yet no one but me seemed willing to do it.
“And how do you suggest we do that?” He stopped and turned to face me, eyebrows arched with sarcasm.
“For starters, we could get rid of those things.” I pointed over to the holes in the floor where the
kiang shi
rested. Granted, it was a little like gun control.
Kiang shi
didn’t kill people. People who controlled
kiang shi
killed people. Still, take away the
kiang shi
and Henry Zhang and his buddies would be back to having to use more conventional weaponry and more conventional authority figures could figure out what to do about it.
His face twisted. “Those things, as you call them, were men once. They didn’t become what they are through any fault of their own.”
Again, to use the gun analogy, I didn’t care how they were made any more than I cared how a 9mm was made. You pointed a gun at someone and pulled a trigger and someone got hurt. You pointed a
kiang shi
at someone, rang a little bell and someone got hurt. Those were the basics I felt I needed to know. “They are what they are. I don’t care how they got that way,” I said.
“Maybe you should,” he countered.
I crossed my arms over my chest. If giving me a lesson on the origins of Chinese vampires would get him on my side, I was willing to listen. At least, for a few moments. Besides, knowing how they came to be might give me some hints as to how to make them go away. “Fine. Fire away.”
“Ever hear of the Drytown Mine Massacre?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“I figured. They don’t exactly teach that in school.” He sat down again on his mat.
I sat down in front of him and settled in for my history lesson.
“On May 15, 1878, fifteen white men went to the Drytown Mine and rounded up at gunpoint all the Chinese men working there.”
I shook my head. “Why?”
The monk snorted. “Do you think they needed a reason beyond that those men were Chinese? They really don’t teach you your history around here, do they?”
I bowed my head a little and bit my lip. Interrupting with questions was only going to make this take longer.
“It was a rich vein. The white men wanted it for themselves. The fact that the Chinese men had already been working it was irrelevant. So they rounded them up at gunpoint.” He paused.
I had a fair idea of what was going to happen next in the story. I just hoped whatever the men had suffered had been brief.
Hope springs eternal. So does the evil that men perpetrate on each other with excuses of skin color and religion and a million other tiny differences that never make any one person less human than the next.
“They herded the men back to their camp. It was a prosperous place. A few of the men had actually been able to bring their wives over. They had thought themselves lucky. Perhaps that was their sin. The hubris of thinking they were special, that they deserved their luck.”
Did pride goeth before a fall in every culture? It seemed so. I didn’t want to hear what came next, but he wasn’t going to stop now.
“They raped the women in front of their husbands and their children.” His voice was almost without inflection now. It made the horror of his words all the more stark. “One man tried to stop them. They slit his throat. Unfortunately, their knives weren’t very sharp. It took him over an hour to bleed to death.”
I felt frozen. I wanted to leave. I knew that I couldn’t. I had to listen to this recitation. If I had a prayer of getting this man’s help, I had to understand how he saw the situation.
“After they were finished taking turns with the women, they beat the men to death with their rifle butts. No need to waste a bullet on a China man when you could just bust in his skull and watch him writhe on the ground in agony as he died while you ate his food and drank his whiskey. Then they hung their bodies from the trees for the crows.”
“What happened to the women and children?” I asked.
“They ran. The white men burned their tents and whatever they didn’t steal. Not all of the women survived, but enough of them did to tell the story, to warn others to stay away from that mine. They didn’t dare come back for the bodies until much later. They let them rot for days, hanging in the trees.” He cocked his head and looked straight at me, almost as if he was surprised that I was still there. “Do you know how a
kiang shi
is made, Ms. Markowitz?”
I did, from my earlier Internet research, but I shook my head anyway.
“It can be any number of factors, but the most common ones are when a person dies a horrific and violent death and when a person isn’t buried properly. When those things happen, a man’s upper spirit ascends, but his lower spirit is stuck in his body. These men had a double curse upon them, violent death and improper burial. By the time their families returned to bury them, it was too late.”
“How did they end up here, buried in your floor?”
He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “As near as we can tell, Wen Cai, the first priest of this temple, heard the stories of walking corpses. He made talismans to control them and brought them here to the temple that was being built, and buried them under the floor. No one knew until we started the renovation and found them, along with scrolls that told their stories.”
I leaned forward. “And then what, George? How did they end up being used to kill gangbangers in McClatchy Park?”
George’s face crumpled. “That part is my fault. All of this, it is my doing.” His shoulders dropped.
“What did you do, George? How is it your fault?”
“I thought it was so interesting. I thought it was a piece of our history. I thought the knowledge of it was something worth preserving. I thought it was something we should understand now so we could make sure that it never happened again.” His voice ascended into something close to a wail.
Whatever I may be now, and trust me, I am not sure of what that is, I was raised Jewish. With that comes a very steady diet of “we shall never forget.” From the time I was in grade school, I knew about the Holocaust. I had the gas chambers explained to me and was shown pictures from the work camps. Sweet, kind and gentle Grandma Rosie wouldn’t speak to the German exchange student next door and would sooner poke herself in the eye with a sharp stick than ride in a Volkswagen. Why? Because we had to make sure it never happened again. I understood exactly what George was talking about. “You were right, George. It is important. It is worth understanding,” I said quietly.
He shook his head. “I went about it in the wrong way. I contacted my brother. I thought the Sino-American Association would be interested. Part of their mission is supposed to be the preservation of our culture.” Bitterness twisted his words.
“Your brother, Henry,” I said.
He nodded his confirmation. “And now we are all in terrible danger. Henry will do anything to get what he wants, and he will kill anyone who gets in his way. He has taken my brother priests hostage and uses them to force me to do unspeakable things.”
