The Girl with Ghost Eyes

  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.

  This blue ghost did not say, kill. He talked. He told me things. He spoke of old age, disease, and death.

  “Change is the origin of suffering,” the blue ghost said.

  “Buddha,” he said.

  “Enlightenment is the end of suffering,” he said.

  “First become human,” he said, “then become enlightened.”

  I woke from dreaming. My mind spun. I took a moment to make sure I wasn’t a tiger. My hands reassured me that my anatomy was my own. I touched my face, my hips, and both my legs. It was me, all right.

  I walked to the books at the other end of the room. Father’s Daoist books were upstairs in the temple’s back room, but here in our basement apartment, Father kept the others. He had literary classics and popular stories. Stories full of strange tales.

  I chose some of the older books and began paging through the thin sheets of rice paper. There were stories of foxes, walking corpses, sorcerers, tigers, and ghosts.

  It didn’t take me long to find what I needed. There were plenty of stories about chang gui, compensation ghosts. A man may drown in a lake, and his spirit will remain trapped there until someone else drowns and takes his place. There are rooms where women hanged themselves and became ghosts, and now these ghost women are always trying to convince other people to hang themselves. To take their place.

  I found the stories I was looking for in old books of strange tales. They were stories about tigers. Tigers, and the murdered spirits that haunt them.

  Story after story described a tiger accompanied by a ghost. Sometimes the ghost wore blue clothing. Sometimes the ghost had blue skin. One sentence made me catch my breath.

  A tiger’s compensation ghost had the ability to communicate with humans in their dreams.

  I was sure of it now. The dream was a message.

  I had been dreaming about the Buddhist monk, Shuai Hu. The man with a tiger’s shadow. If I understood the dream correctly, Shuai Hu had a chang gui. He was a tiger, and his compensation ghosts drove him to kill. He killed many men, and each one took the place of the last. Then he killed a Buddhist monk, and the monk became his chang gui, but the monk hadn’t urged him to kill people. The monk urged him to seek enlightenment.

  I needed to wash, so I put a pot of water on the stove. When the water was warm, I removed my clothes and washed myself with soap and a warm cloth.

  Guilt. I was amazed to feel it. Shuai Hu was a three-tailed tiger spirit, and I felt guilty for attacking him. It was absurd, but it was how I felt. As if I had done something very, very impolite.

  And he had been polite to me. He’d addressed me respectfully, even remembering to call me Daonu, the formal title of a female Daoshi. There was no one else I knew who addressed me by title.

  He had been born a tiger, but he was a baldie now. What had been a monster was now trying to be a man. He followed the Eightfold Path of the baldies, meditating and abstaining from meat. Shuai Hu wasn’t just trying to be a man; he was trying to be a righteous man.

  It amazed me that an animal would even want that.

  That was the kind of monster I wanted for an ally.

  I dried myself off, and dressed in the sand-yellow robes of a Daoshi, to go and talk to the tiger.

  The baldies stood on the Flower Lane, performing martial exercises. Their motions were crisp and straight and regimented. Strong, direct movements. A dozen Shaolin warrior monks stood in front of me. They were strong men, men of peace, and they knew how to fight.

  So this is Shaolin, I thought. I marveled at the idea of Shuai Hu. Such a powerful animal. By nature a tiger is the fiercest of predators. A tiger with two tails would gain power, and this tiger had grown three tails. His power would be immense.

  Take that powerful monster and train it in Shaolin. Teach it the discipline and deadliness of martial arts. I didn’t need to see Bok Choy after all. I was going to recruit a three-tailed tiger trained in Shaolin kung fu, and no Daoshi of the Fifth or army of hatchetmen or evil snake-arm could hope to stand against it.

  Shuai Hu would rend my enemies with monstrous claws. I didn’t know what I would do while I watched. Maybe I’d bring a flask of rice wine.

  The martial exercises came to an end, and the warrior monks dispersed. Some went to meditate, others went to work. Shuai Hu gave me a suspicious look. Wiping sweat from his forehead, he walked toward me. He peered all around to see if I had anyone hiding to ambush him.

  “Daonu Xian,” he said with a wary tone, and inclined his head in my direction.

  “Shuai Hu, I fear I have done you a disservice.”

  His look could have stopped a wild stallion in its tracks. “What have you done?”

  “I thought of you as a monster,” I said. My throat felt dry. “I did not understand your aspirations.”

  His eyes narrowed. “What aspirations do you mean?”

  I looked in his eyes, and saw a depth in there. “You want to live like a human. You want to pursue the Buddhist Eightfold Path, so that you can be reborn as a human and achieve enlightenment.”

  “Where did you hear of these things?”

  It was a strange question. I didn’t understand what was going through his mind. “In a dream,” I said.

  He turned away as fast as a stone launched from a slingshot. “Lan Ge!” he yelled. “Show yourself, ghost!”

  On an awning at the left side of the street, a small blue man stood up and stretched. He was two or three inches tall, only a little bigger than Mr. Yanqiu. His skin was the rich blue of the ocean. There was no hair on his head. He yawned.

  So this was Shuai Hu’s final murder victim. The little blue man had given up the possibility of finding peace and a happier rebirth in order to work toward the enlightenment of an animal. Of the animal that killed him.

  “Lan Ge,” Shuai Hu growled. “You’ve been sending dreams again.”

  The blue man said nothing. He yawned once more.

  “We must not force others to see those things they do not choose to see,” the tiger monk said, his tone scolding. “That is the way of Mara, father of illusions. It is not our way.”

  The blue man yawned again. Then he said, “The Dharma is no rigid thing, Brother Hu; you know there are eighty-four thousand doors to the Dharma.”

  What was going on here? It seemed as though the blue ghost’s morality was more flexible than the tiger’s. Maybe the tiger needed to follow a rigid moral code, in order to remain on his path.

  “Why have you done such a thing, Lan Ge?”

  “It needed to be done, Brother Hu. This girl can change everything.”

  Startled, I said, ?
??Me?”

  The little blue man turned to face me. His gaze was lethargic and sleepy. “For more than a hundred years, my tiger friend Shuai Hu has followed the Buddha’s teachings. He has been a good man, Xian Li-lin, pursuing right actions, and yet, still, wherever we have gone, the Daoshi have come after him with their weapons and their spells. He would have killed them if they fought, so he fled from town to town, from monastery to monastery. He fled to protect the men who wanted to kill him.”

  “I think I understand,” I said, “but what does this have to do with me?”

  “You are a Daoshi, Xian Li-lin, and the daughter of a Daoshi. And yet you are friends with a monster. You are friends with a talking eyeball.”

  I blanched. “Mr. Yanqiu saved me when I was trapped in the world of spirits.”

  The blue ghost’s smile was irritatingly serene. “You made an exception for him.”

  “There are no exceptions,” I said. “It’s why I exorcised Mr. Yanqiu.”

  The blue ghost looked surprised, and then he looked intrigued. “You exorcised a spirit that saved your life?”

  “I did as I must.”

  “‘Thieves may harm thieves, and enemies may harm each other, but a poorly directed mind can do much greater harm.’”

  “You quote the teachings of the Buddha, Blue Ghost, but I do not follow them.”

  “Well then,” he said, “‘Nowhere can be found a principle that is right in all circumstances, or an action that is wrong in all circumstances.’”

  He had quoted the Liezi, one of the major scriptures of the Dao. I was slow to respond.

  “I am a daughter and a student. My father, my teacher, decreed that Mr. Yanqiu must be destroyed.”

  “And yet you came here today, Daonu Xian, to talk with Shuai Hu. You know he is a monster, but you did not come to make war, did you?”

  “He is trying to be a righteous man.”

  “So it’s not enough for you to say a monster is a monster. You see a monster trying to better himself as a human being, and you respect him for that.”

  “I do,” I said, slowly. “And I have come to seek his help. Men are going to die if he doesn’t help me.”

  “What is happening?” the tiger-monk asked, a serious demeanor on his round face.

  “There is a soulstealer in Chinatown,” I said. “He intends to raise a giant monster and use it to massacre hundreds of people.”

  “What does this have to do with me?” he asked, his voice a growl.

  “I need to fight him,” I said. “He’s going to perform a ritual tonight. I need to stop the ritual before he can call forth the monster.”

  “That sounds like something you and your father should be able to handle, Daonu Xian.”

  “Father is wounded,” I said. “The soulstealer anticipated my father as a threat and sent a monster after him. A quanshen.”

  “But still,” said the tiger, “you nearly knocked me over when you kicked my shoulder, and you seem lethal with that rope dart. I cannot imagine you would need help to fight one man.”

  “He isn’t alone, Shuai Hu. He has allied himself with hateful spirits. One of his arms is some kind of demon. He has the force of the Ansheng tong behind him—up to forty armed men.”

  “There are men?” he asked.

  “Yes, a number of men. I don’t know how many.”

  A significant look passed between the tiger and the blue ghost. “What is it you want me to do, Daonu Xian?”

  “Fight them,” I said. “Join with me and fight them at my side. Will you do this thing?”

  “No.” The word came out crisp, emphatic, and final. I took an involuntary step back.

  “But you must,” I said, looking into his face. His eyes were deep and unreadable.

  “No,” he repeated. “I am a monster, Daonu Xian. At every moment I am choosing to be better than my nature. I follow the Five Precepts. I will never take another life.”

  “You can fight them without killing them if that is what you need,” I told him.

  Shrugging his massive shoulders, he turned away. “At every moment I struggle to control myself. Soulstealers and yaoguai may be your enemies, but passion, aggression, and ignorance are mine. It is too easy for me to revert to my nature. I have chosen not to be a beast. Were I to join in this battle as a man, Daonu Xian, I would not be of much assistance to you. You are asking me to fight as a monster. This I will not do.”

  I stamped my foot in frustration. “So fight as a man! I can’t fight them alone.”

  “And if I should kill one by mistake?”

  “Then one of them dies by mistake. Is your oath more important than the lives of hundreds of men?”

  “No,” he said, “it’s more than the oath. Daonu Xian, you know I was born a tiger. Tigers grow up to nine feet in length. We weigh as much as six hundred pounds. We are among the deadliest of beasts. And we seldom live longer than twenty years.” His eyes were as clear and ancient as any I’d ever seen. “In my fiftieth year I grew a second tail, and I grew in power. In my hundredth year I grew a third tail, and my power increased again. In all my years in China’s forests, I never saw a tiger with more than two tails. My power is already terrible. And soon I will grow a fourth tail. I do not know what I will be capable of.”

  “You’re almost two hundred years old,” I breathed.

  He nodded. “When a tiger kills a man, the man’s ghost stays with the tiger. The most recent victim’s spirit remains trapped until someone replaces him.”

  “Until you kill someone else,” I said.

  “Yes. I do not know how many I killed. I killed men and I killed women. I killed children, Daonu Xian. Each of them hung on me like a weight. Each of them drove my aggression.”

  “They wanted you to kill someone else.”

  “So they could move on, yes, they wanted me to kill again. Until I killed Lan Ge.”

  The blue ghost turned to me, yawning. “I had taken an oath,” the blue man said. “I had sworn to work toward the enlightenment of all beings.”

  “Do you understand, Daonu Xian? Do you understand yet?”

  I looked at him. I saw it beneath his big happy cheeks, his warrior shoulders. I saw sorrow, and guilt, and fear. He had no fear for himself. He was afraid of what he might wind up doing to other people. “I think I do understand,” I said, my voice resigned. “You are one of the most dangerous beings in the world. Soon you will be more powerful. If you kill someone else, even by accident, he will take Lan Ge’s place. You think without a Buddhist ghost at your side, you will stray from your path.”

  The monk looked down. “I will become a killer again, Daonu. A mindless, murderous animal, driven to violence by ghost after ghost of the people I will murder.”

  I looked away, feeling weary. The vigor drained out of my voice. “And once you have your fourth tail, human weapons and magical spells may not be enough to bring you down.”

  He nodded.

  “Thank you, Shuai Hu,” I said. I felt genuine sadness for this man, this monster. I bowed and turned away.

  “Wait, Daonu,” he said. “What are you going to do?”

  I faced him.

  “I’ll fight them,” I said, “of course. But first I will ask my father for guidance.”

  19

  It was early afternoon when I reached the corner of Pacific and Dupont. I saw the infirmary door and gasped. An ugly knot of spirits clustered outside the door. Little black fists crawled around on spider legs, creepy and cackling. Each of them had the face of a human baby. My shoulders were tense. I took a deep breath.

  “Aiya,” I said.

  Yaozhizhu, goblin spiders, had crawled onto the streets of Chinatown, out of folktale and nightmare.

  For now the yaozhizhu crowded around the infirmary’s doorway, their cries grotesquely human. The talismans, I realized; Father’s talismans were keeping them out.

  To the side of the infirmary’s door I saw three squirming shapes. They reminded me of cats that boys have trapped inside
bags, to toy with and torture, but they were human spirits. Three people had lost portions of their souls here, trapped in the gray-white webs. The goblin spiders would suck out the essence of spirit at their leisure. It was a horrifying fate.

  I walked closer, to get a better look. The yaozhizhu had spun an enormous spirit web. It covered the entire entryway with gossamer strands and a filthing of the air. I guessed they had spun another one over the back door. No one would be able to enter or leave the infirmary without getting caught in the sticky, fleshy webs of the goblin spiders.

  I looked at the baby faces of the yaozhizhu and felt my skin crawl. They were foul creatures. Vile mockeries of humanity. Looking at them, I wanted a different life. I wanted to be someone who didn’t have to see such monstrosities.

  The goblin spiders skittered and giggled by dozens or hundreds. Drool and snot dripped from their childlike faces.

  One of the webbed bags of human spirit squirmed, struggling inside its snare. No human thing should be so degraded. The spirit portion would last hours or days, slurped down like milk by the baby-faces of the goblin spiders.

  “Get out of here, Li-lin!” Dr. Wei stuck his head out of the second-floor window. “The infirmary is under quarantine! Go away!”

  So the residents of the infirmary were aware of the yaozhizhu. They were treating it like an epidemic.

  “Is Father inside?” I called up to the window.

  “There’s nothing you can do for him. Go away from here!”

  “Is he well?” I called up.

  Dr. Wei pushed his spectacles higher on his nose with a weary look. “The infirmary is under quarantine, Li-lin! Do you understand me? You need to go away, now.”

  “Is my father well?”

  The doctor hesitated. “If I tell you, will you go away?”

  “Of course I will, Dr. Wei,” I lied.

  “He’s gotten worse,” he called down. “He came down with an illness.”

  A wave of horror washed over me. “Did he try to leave?” I asked Dr. Wei.