The Girl with Ghost Eyes (6 page)

We both turned our attention back to the eye. Mao’er shifted back into the shape of an orange cat and scampered into the shadows. I knew I’d see him soon enough. He wouldn’t forget the food I owed him.

I crouched down and faced the little spirit. Some of the yaoguai can change shape and size, and many have unexpected strengths. Yes, the eyeball spirit looked harmless, but in the land of monsters, it is always best to be prepared—and feared.

I tried to make my voice sound impressive, like my father’s. “My name is Xian Li-lin. I am a Maoshan Daoshi and a killer of monsters. What kind of monster are you?”

Tilting its eyeball up to look at me, the spirit huffed. “Hardly polite to call someone a monster when you’ve only just met.”

I blinked and stared. “A yaoguai is lecturing me in manners?”

“Harrumph,” he said, crossing his arms. His gaze somehow seemed harsh, disapproving. Familiar. “I will lecture you in manners, young lady,” he said, “and you will listen.”

I smiled, leaning back. “What will you do to me if I don’t listen?” I asked. And then I said, under my breath, “Little monster.”

The spirit had no face other than its eye, but in that moment I could have sworn he was scowling. “If you continue to be rude to me,” he said, “why would I guide you back to your body?”

6

“You know how to lead me back to my body?”

“You heard me,” the eyeball said, uncrossing his arms and crossing them again behind his back. He looked … smug.

It’s strange to crouch on a street corner talking to an eye. It’s hard to look into an eye and talk to it. But this yaoguai had just offered me hope. He claimed he could lead me back to my body, back to my life.

“What will it cost me?”

“Not a thing,” he said. “But I expect you to be polite.”

“All right,” I said, though I did not relish the thought of having to be polite to one of the yaoguai. “What shall I call you?”

He looked surprised. “I …” he said. “I don’t think I have a name.”

I raised an eyebrow at that. “I can’t address you respectfully if you don’t have a name,” I said. I thought for a moment. “How about Mr. Yanqiu?”

He hesitated. “Mr. Yanqiu,” he said, thinking. “Mr. Eyeball. Yes, I think I like that.”

“Mr. Yanqiu, please will you lead me back to my body?”

He gave me a scornful look. “Maybe later.”

“Later? I need to get back as soon as I can.”

“You called me a monster, young lady. And I will not lead you anywhere until you apologize for it.”

My mouth dropped open. I had agreed to be polite to him, but the little monster wasn’t going to make it easy for me.

“Mr. Yanqiu, Shifu,” I said, addressing him as a teacher, “I lose much face for insulting you. Shall I knock my head to the earth nine times?”

“That will do nicely,” he said.

“What did you say?”

“You offered to knock your head to the earth nine times, and I accepted.”

I looked at him, startled. “But …” I said. One only knocks one’s head to the earth before the truly great, like Empress Dowager Cixi or the Emperor, yet manners dictate making the offer.

“You made an offer,” he said, “and I’m accepting it. Do you want to find your way back to your body or not?”

Frustration made me clench my fists. I was angry, resenting it. I felt shame, both for my behavior and for my powerlessness. Could the spirit really guide me back to my body? He claimed he could, and he made that claim without me telling him anything. Somehow he’d known that was what I wanted.

I had little choice. I could humble myself before this monster and maybe make it back to my body, or I could save face and stay trapped in the spirit world. Holding back anger, I positioned myself on my hands and knees. I closed my eyes and prepared to smack my forehead to the ground.

And then the eyeball laughed.

His laugh wasn’t grumpy and cruel as I expected. It was a light laugh, playful, warm, and welcoming.

“I’m only teasing you, young lady,” the eye said. “Come on. Get up and follow me.”

Eyes wide, I stood and brushed myself off. “Little monster,” I said under my breath.

“I heard that,” he replied.

*

Mr. Yanqiu’s tiny legs made him walk slowly, so I lifted him to my shoulder and let him ride. I turned where he said I needed to turn, followed where he told me to go. Lefts and rights, we walked through a fog between life and death, tracing mystic steps along the spirit side of Chinatown.

“We’re getting closer,” I said. “I can feel it.”

“Of course we are,” he said.

Through a thin sheet of mist I saw Father’s temple. Its wood and brick were almost the same vivid colors I remembered, hardly dampened by any of the spirit world’s ash-and-gold moonlight. I started walking toward the temple.

“Not there,” Mr. Yanqiu said. “That isn’t where we are going.”

I turned to him, puzzled. “But that’s where I left myself. My body.”

“Turn right,” he said. “Two blocks down, on Dupont.”

I did as he said, stepping through the afternoon crowds, until we arrived outside Dr. Wei’s infirmary. Dr. Wei was Father’s friend; they often smoked cigars and played fantan together, all the while arguing. Dr. Wei incorporated American medicine into his practice, and supported the young Emperor’s reforms. Father argued that the old ways are best, that the Empress Dowager knew best, and that China should remain as it had always been.

Outside the infirmary door was a string of talismans painted on cloth. They were Father’s talismans, as strong as they come, to keep out spirits and diseases, but a new talisman had been added. A talisman I’d never seen before.

My name was written on it, in ghostscript, surrounded by a drawing of a door. I gazed at it, amazed.

My father had posted a talisman that granted me passage through his magical barriers.

Father had always been so distant, so powerful. I was stunned that he’d gone to such an effort for me.

I was so grateful that tears almost came to my eyes. Father had made a talisman for me, just for me, so I could come find him here. It was unlike him to be so considerate. A rush of emotion swept through me, all of it confused. And yet I still didn’t understand why my father wanted me to enter here, the infirmary, and not our home.

I turned my head to face the eyeball spirit. “Is he injured?”

The eye looked away, saying nothing. It felt to me as though he was protecting me from knowledge that might cause me pain. His gesture reminded me somehow of the look on my father’s face when he’s hiding something. When Father looks away, blinking too fast, I can always tell that he’s lying.

I stopped and thought for a moment about the eyeball on my shoulder. It was a strange monster, one of the yaoguai, and it had no relation to the social order. Something was wrong. My father would never summon a yaoguai into Chinatown. And how was it that Mr. Yanqiu was able to navigate the passage between the world of spirits and the world of men? He had no kind of red string to guide him.

There was something I was missing. Without something like a red string, the spirit on my shoulder shouldn’t have been able to find his way across the realms. Not unless he was anchored somehow, tethered, as though he was part of a living body.

I thought for a moment about the human body, the amazing dynamism of it all: the way vital energy flows along meridians, rising from the Bubbling Springs on the soles to the Upper Cinnabar Field in the skull, giving life to the spirit of each organ, the spirit of each limb, the spirit of each …

And then I had a sinking feeling. It felt like a piece of glass had fallen from the top of a building, fallen slowly and in infinite quiet, and shattered to a hundred pieces at the bottom.

“You,” I said to the eyeball spirit riding on my shoulder. “I know what you are.”

He looked at me, curious. “What am I, Li-lin?”

I couldn’t speak. I felt words choke in my throat. “You’re his eye,” I managed to squeeze out. “You’re the spirit of my father’s eye.”

Mr. Yanqiu leaned back quietly.

“But it makes no sense,” I continued. “In order to send you to me in the spirit world, Father would need to … he would need to …”

I couldn’t bring myself to say the words out loud.
He would need to gouge out one of his own eyes.

The eyeball nodded. “He’s recovering in the infirmary now. You’re unconscious in the cot next to his.”

“Why would he do something like that?”

“He could tell your red string had been broken. You needed a guide to bring you back to the lands of the living. He sent me.”

“No,” I said, “no. It makes no sense. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t do that. Not for me.”

The spirit of his eye looked at me sharply. “But he did.”

Mr. Yanqiu was the spirit of my father’s eye, but he had been without conscious thought until Father’s spell. He didn’t know Father as I did. My father wouldn’t do this for me. There must have been some other reason, something I didn’t grasp yet.

I lowered my head and walked to the infirmary’s front door. The string of cloth talismans formed a barrier, and I felt it push against me, a sensation like a gathering wind. There was no going forward against the force of the barrier. But then the talisman with my name on it opened a path for me. It felt like a tree had been interposed between me and the wind; I heard the roar of it go on to each side of me.

I moved past the barrier, and Mr. Yanqiu dropped off my shoulder with a yelp. I turned to see him flopped face-first on the ground behind me, pushing himself up. “How undignified,” he said.

“You can’t make it past the talismans.”

“Obviously not,” he said, brushing off dust from the street with his tiny hands. He had the injured look of a man whose pride had been wounded. My father’s spell had locked him out, excluded him. Treated him like any other strange monster.

I looked at the eyeball spirit, concerned. “Listen, Mr. Yanqiu. I’m going inside to join spirit with body. I’ll probably be in there for a few hours, to talk with Father and Dr. Wei. Do you think you’ll be safe out here until I can come back?”

The eye gave me a shrewd look. “You won’t come back,” he said. “Once you’re back in your body you won’t even be able to see me.”

I blinked at that. “You don’t know,” I said. “You don’t know that I have yin eyes, do you?”

“Yin eyes? That means you can see spirits?”

“Yes.”

With a tiny white hand he scratched his chin, or, where his chin would be if he had a face. “Am I a yin eye?”

“Hm,” I said, stalling. “You are … that is, Father does not have yin eyes. But now you are a spirit, and maybe it depends which eye you were. I do not know whether you are yin.”

“Harrumph,” he said.

“Do you think you will be safe?” I repeated.

“I can take care of myself,” he said, with a scowl in his voice.

I walked to the door. My body would be resting inside the infirmary, unconscious, and my father would be there too. Missing an eye, recuperating under his friend’s care.

The door opened, and one of Dr. Wei’s apprentices rushed out, his braided queue shaking behind him. I saw the door closing behind him, and darted through while it was still open.

The infirmary was active. Dr. Wei, his wife, and three other apprentices were there, tending the needs of a few sick people. Like so many other good things, the infirmary was paid for by Mr. Wong; it was open to anyone who paid dues to the Ansheng tong. The English-language papers liked to portray the tongs as crime syndicates. But were it not for Mr. Wong’s philanthropy, sick people would go untreated, corpses would go unburied, immigrants would find no place to work or live, and ghosts would go unexorcised.

I found my body resting in a cot on the second floor of Dr. Wei’s infirmary. I approached my body as if it were a different person entirely. Her lips were parted, and I could hear her breath dragging in and out. Without hun, the higher soul, the body’s breath would be shallow; it would generate less and less qi, or lifeforce.

I had gone out of body before, but never for so long. My body looked so young. So innocent. The face I saw was almost a child’s, untouched by evil, and not the face of the brokenhearted widow. My mouth seemed limp, my cheeks sallow in the infirmary’s lamplight. Bare of my usual expressions, silly or caustic, my moon-shaped face looked bland as tofu. Stretched out on the cot, my body seemed small and fragile.

However, the best weapons often seem small and fragile. And I hadn’t forgotten about Mr. Liu. I knew my skin would be marked where he had cut me, and I was going to use every weapon at my disposal to make him suffer. I was going to teach him that Rocket’s wife is no one to be trifled with. He would pay for cutting my skin. He would pay for costing Father his eye.

I glanced to the next cot over, where Father was sleeping. The entire right side of his face was wrapped in bandages, and bandages covered much of his scalp. Graying hair poked out from between the bandages. Under a trimmed, gray-white mustache, the edges of his mouth were turned down, as if in a disapproving frown. Father was so sleekly built that he seemed to leave almost no impression at all on the cot.

He had never struck me as small before, and yet here he was, resting, wounded. He gave a soft whimper in his sleep. He was in pain. If I knew my father, he had refused to take opium for his pain.

He was in pain, and I hated it. He was suffering for me, because I had fallen into a trap. If I had waited for him, asked permission like an obedient daughter, he would not be suffering now. But I had thought I could make my own decision, and now my father would pay the price for my transgression. My father was half-blind, and it was my fault.

Why had he done it? Why had he sacrificed his eye for me? Conflicting emotions surged through me. I was tempted to feel cherished, but that couldn’t be right. There had to be more to it. I was missing something. And I would have no way to learn what it was until he awoke.

The loss of my father’s eye was one more debt I owed him, one more debt I could never repay. But there was something I could do.

I was going to find the man responsible for this, and I was going to crush him.