by K.N. Lee
Sanit’s body shuddered, and it seemed to Irene that he was fading, his features all running together as if he were melting. And then Irene understood—Zara planned to kill him.
“No!” Irene shouted, grabbing the bars of her cage. She gritted her teeth against the pain, shaking the bars with all her might. “Stop it! Leave him alone!” Around here there were howls of rage and grief from the other ghosts. Ukrit was whimpering, his cries shrill and piercing like an animal in pain.
Sanit grew paler and paler, his body becoming translucent. Irene could see the wall and the cage bars behind Sanit through him now. His arms and legs drooped and blurred until his body was just one giant blob that shrank in on itself, growing smaller and smaller. Finally, Sanit’s face and head melted and ran, like chalk in the rain, melding into what remained of his body. In a moment, it was all over. All that remained was a formless mound of gray smoke.
“Nooooo!” Irene screamed, but it was too late. Sanit was dead.
6
Zara brushed off her lap and stood up, holding the turkey baster. Through the translucent tube, Irene could see the swirling, shimmering remains of Sanit’s life force.
Zara turned to Irene. On her face she wore a look of contempt mixed with smugness. “Whatcha gonna do without your teacher, huh?” She laughed. “You’re not the first he’s tried to teach, but, apparently, you are the last.”
It was like there was a swarm of angry bees buzzing in Irene’s head, drowning out everything else. The pain coursing up her arms, Ukrit’s wailing sobs, even Zara’s words were background noise, buried under the buzzing. Dimly, she was aware of a murderous rage bubbling up through her. She wasn’t even sure she could speak; the rage was so big it overwhelmed her ability to think, to see straight, to even open her mouth. Zara just laughed again and then crossed to the door. She closed it behind her, once more plunging them all into darkness. Irene noted only one thing: Zara had taken the knife with her.
For a few minutes, the only sound was Ukrit’s muffled sobs and Irene’s raspy breathing. Irene waited for it to get light, but then remembered that Sanit made the light, and Sanit was gone.
She threw herself cross-legged on the ground, resolution burning through her. She focused hard, angrily jamming her mind into the nothingness place where her ghost senses existed. She mentally reached for the bars, angrily pushing at them with her mind.
Zap.
She rebounded off the electrical charge from the ghost repellents, barely noticing the pain. Even angrier, she charged again, willing herself to go through the bars.
Zap.
She tried again. And again. And again.
“You are not doing it right.” Boonsri’s voice, as soft and unemotional as ever, sounded unnervingly loud in the dark.
“Then you do it,” Irene snapped, the anger consuming her lashing out blindly in all directions like fireworks.
“Anger is not going to help,” Boonsri replied, anger reflected in her own voice.
“Oh? And you’re the expert?”
“Do not take your grief out on me. I am not the one you’re angry at.”
Irene snarled and jumped to her feet, hitting her head on the roof of her cage. “You know what? Fuck you! If you’re so smart, how come you never learned how to get out? How come you never fought Zara and rescued everyone?”
“I did not say I was more capable than you. I only said that anger wouldn’t help.”
Ukrit whimpered. “Please don’t fight,” he said plaintively.
Irene huffed in frustration and dropped back into a sitting position. Boonsri might be right, but that fact didn’t do anything to dispel the impotent rage consuming her. She needed to do something, and throwing herself at the bars over and over at least gave her a place to put her anger and grief, even if it was getting her nowhere.
“The foreigner is not going to help us,” one of the male ghosts in the farther off cages said loudly. “Why would she? You are wasting your time with her.”
Irene wanted to make an angry retort, but bit her tongue. Ukrit was right—they didn’t need to spend time and energy fighting amongst themselves. She needed to focus on getting out of this cage. The window for taking on Zara was small—and shrinking every minute. The constant burnings were already taking their toll on her—she was in so much pain she could hardly even think straight, and she hardly had the strength to remain upright. Too much more, and she wouldn’t be able to do much more than curl in a ball and stay there like Sanit.
The dark was making her skin crawl. She needed some light, needed to see. Everything sounded extraordinarily loud in the dark—the slightest shifting of anyone’s position sounded like the lock on the outside door rasping open. Irene imagined she heard rats scratching in the dirt and felt spiders crawling on her.
The small comfort of a light would take the edge off and help her focus. She crossed her legs and sat up straighter, trying to copy Boonsri’s meditative pose. She shook back her hair and then, with a deep breath, let the world around her fade away as she retreated into herself. She wasn’t quite sure how Sanit had made his ghost aura brighter, but she assumed it was the opposite of moving through the bars. If moving through the bars was achieved by making herself less herself, then, she reasoned, making her aura brighter had to be about making herself more herself. If moving between the bars involved somehow merging herself with her surroundings, then making her aura brighter must involve withdrawing herself from her surroundings—or, at least, that’s what she hoped.
She reached inside, searching for something beyond what she normally felt; not the feel of her ghost body—arms and legs and all her other associated parts, but instead, she searched for the energy that she was comprised of, that river of life force she had felt flowing out of her when Zara had bled her. The ancient Egyptians called it the Ka.
At first, she sensed nothing—a thick, palpable emptiness. She wasn’t quite deep enough. She focused on her heart beat, listened to it and let herself sync to the rhythm. She imagined her blood passing through her heart and flowing through her veins, down to her feet and then back up again to her arms. Only, in her mind’s eye, her blood was the faint blue of her ghost aura. And then she could feel it—the flow of energy coursing through her. Not warm, not cold, just strong and… beautiful. It was beautiful; that was the only word she could think of to describe the iridescent river of cold, bright blues. Looking on it, feeling it moving within her, she felt… powerful. The energy was dormant, almost passive, but below the surface she felt… potential. With just a little push, that river could become wild, untamed. She could imagine what it would feel like, the unfettered energy raging through her, bursting out from her fingers and toes like lightening. The force of it would rip her apart.
She felt her control slipping—the river was calling to her, urging her to let it loose, to take off the leash and to let it explode like the heart of a star in a thunderous, tumultuous conflagration.
With difficulty, Irene pulled back, distancing herself from the feel of her life force but still holding it in her conscious mind. She needed to somehow flare the energy while still controlling it. She hesitated, unsure how to proceed, sensing that things go could very, very wrong if she lost control. She thought of Andras, his glorious bursts of blinding light whenever he appeared, and she thought also of when she had experienced the memories of a star, the glorious, all-consuming inferno that had been her existence, and she thought of how small a difference there was between the two. Everything in the universe was on fire, burning all the time; the only distinction was the scale. Atoms were constantly in motion, banging into each other, exploding apart and rejoining. Bodies burned calories, expended energy, sent that energy back out into the world through motion that set off other chain reactions. Waves crashed, wind blew, and the sun exploded.
She approached the energy currents again and pushed gently, trying to move the current faster without “sloshing” it and making waves. After several attempts, she managed to find the right amount of force to push the
current to get the result she wanted. The energy pulsed through her, stronger and faster, but still tame and compliant.
Ukrit let out a soft gasp. Irene opened her eyes. For a second, she saw the bright blue light of her ghost aura illuminating the room, and then, as she changed her focus from controlling the energy current to the world around her, it winked out. “Damn it,” she muttered. It was going to take some practice to be able to divide her attention between controlling her aura and something else, like carrying on a conversation, but at least now she understood the principle.
She focused again, this time trying to keep her eyes open while she connected with the energy flowing within her. It took several attempts, but eventually, she could “push” the energy enough to cast a dim, blue light.
In the feeble illumination, she looked across to Boonsri’s cage. Boonsri, seated in her usual meditative pose, was looking distinctly see-through. Irene could clearly see the bars on the far side of the cage through Boonsri. “Hey, are you okay?” she asked, gritting her teeth with the effort it took to keep the hold on her ghost light.
Boonsri turned to Irene, and Irene gasped. Boonsri’s features were distorted and warped, one side of her face drooping like a stroke victim.
“What’s happening?” Irene asked, her ghost light winking out as her concentration slipped. She jumped to her knees and scooted closer to Boonsri, trying to see her.
“I…” Boonsri laughed—a watery, despairing sound that was unnervingly loud in the dark. “Sanit was sharing his strength with me. Without him, I…”
She didn’t have to finish. Irene had seen what was happening. Boonsri was starting to melt, no longer able to hold herself together.
“Hey,” Irene said urgently. “Listen, you have to hang on, okay?”
“What do you think I’m doing?” Boonsri said snappishly, though there was equal parts fear and impatience in her tone.
Panic welled up inside Irene—she couldn’t lose another person. Without thinking, she reached out to Boonsri with her ghost senses, pushing the glow of her aura toward the young woman. It wasn’t a conscious thought so much as a reflex, a knee-jerk empathetic urge to reach out and comfort the other woman.
A ball of light shot out from Irene and slammed into Boonsri, knocking her over. Boonsri exclaimed in surprise as she fell.
“Oh my God!” Irene cried, covering her mouth in surprise. “Shit. Are you okay?”
In the gloom, Irene could make out Boonsri’s outline enough to see Boonsri sit back up, shaking her head as if to clear it. Irene closed her eyes and focused hard, trying to flare her ghost aura. She managed to ignite it, though she didn’t have as great a control as she’d like. She could feel the energy building inside her, trying to break free. She ignored the feeling and opened her eyes, so she could look at Boonsri. To Irene’s relief, the young woman looked like herself once more—solid and intact.
Boonsri glared at her. “That was stupid—and wrong. Giving energy to me is no better than Zara taking it.”
“I didn’t mean to do that… not exactly. I… to be honest, I’m not sure what I just did.”
“I told you what you did; you gave me some of your essence.”
“I take it that’s not how Sanit did it?”
Irene was losing her grip on her Ka. She couldn’t keep stimulating it to flow faster and simultaneously keep up the conversation with Boonsri. Her ghost light flickered.
Boonsri had arranged herself back into her meditative pose, but she paused before closing her eyes to give Irene an exasperated look. “No.”
That was the last thing Irene saw before her ghost light went out. She hardly noticed the dark; Boonsri’s words were making her think. She could feel excitement building within her—she thought she might understand what Sanit had been trying to teach her.
“Okay, well, explain to me how he did it.”
“Why? So you can copy what he did? I told you, I do not want you to waste your strength in this way.”
“No, not so I can replicate it—I mean, I’m not planning on giving you any more energy unless you really need it. But I think this energy transference thing might be related to how I can get out of this cage.”
When the glob of energy had left her, she hadn’t been trying to “push” energy to Boonsri, the way she pushed herself through cracks when she traveled between planes. Rather, she’d been trying to reach out to Boonsri, as if there was no distance between them—almost as if to hug her. She might even say that she had been trying to pull Boonsri to her. It was as if she’d thrown out a rope and hooked Boonsri, and in that moment, they had been tethered together; it was, as Sanit had said, as if they were one. In a way, she’d extended part of herself through the bars of her cage. She’d extended that part too fast, with too much force, and that piece had broken off and continued on, flying to Boonrsi.
“I don’t know,” Boonsri said. “He just did. We meditated together and strength flowed from him to me.”
Irene was pretty sure that confirmed her hypothesis. If she could extend herself through the bars with more control, mimicking the same sort of mental state she’d had when she’d reached out to Boonsri, then she should be able to push herself through the bars.
She got it now—or, at least, she thought she did. She didn’t need to focus on pushing herself as far as Boonsri or even as far as outside the bars. She needed to focus on pushing herself into the bars—she needed to become a part of the bars—and then, once there, she needed to push herself into the space beyond the bars—to become the air outside of her cage—and then, finally, to separate herself from the air and re-coalesce.
She backed away from the bars and dropped back down into a sitting position, her heart still pounding, but now it was from excitement. She shook her hair back from her face and took a quick, calming breath to focus herself. She knew she didn’t have the skill yet to accomplish what needed to be done, but at least she understood the theory and the steps she would need to take. With that knowledge, she had a way forward. It was only a matter of time before she could get out of the cage, and then… then Zara better watch out.
Irene’s shoes burst into flames, and she cried out, scrambling backwards reflexively to get away. She stamped her feet, trying to put out the fire. She backed into the cage bars and electricity shot through her, blotting out everything but the searing pain that convulsed her. Her back arced and her arms flailed helplessly.
She managed to roll to the side, moving off the bars, and collapsed on the ground. She rolled into a ball. The flames extinguished, and she was left panting, in too much agony to even cry. This was only the start, she knew. Zara would continue to torture her through the night. Numbly, she reached out with one hand, groping in the dirt of the floor for Andras’s rock. She found it and curled her fingers around it, holding onto it tight.
7
Irene sat up gingerly. She didn’t think there was a part of her that wasn’t burnt. It was the third—or maybe fourth, it was so hard to keep track of time in the windowless shed—straight day of torture.
Strangely, restoring her appearance was easier now, coming almost automatically as soon as the pain receded enough for her to put two thoughts together. It was as if the more Zara hurt her, the stronger her sense of self became. Or maybe it was simply that now she knew how to connect directly to her Ka, she was more rooted in it and lived less in her physical self.
It was strange, but now, living more fully in her ghost senses made her feel stronger, more powerful, than she ever had, with a deeper sense of herself. She had thought it would be the opposite—she’d been hesitant to learn how to use her ghost senses because she had feared it would take her further from the physical world. Instead, she felt more connected to everything but in a more effortless, natural way than before. It was kind of like how walking was easier, more natural, when you didn’t think about it, and, instead, just did it. If she thought about the feel of her physical self, she felt nothing but scars and burns and cuts. If she thought about t
he feel of her Ka, however, she felt whole and perfect and beautiful, and her physical self instantly adjusted to reflect this. She supposed this meant that while Zara might hurt her body, she couldn’t touch her soul. Irene took some small satisfaction in that.
No matter the cause, the end result was that Zara’s torture wasn’t having the desired effect. If anything, it was making Irene stronger, by forcing her to connect with her Ka more frequently. Irene took a great deal of satisfaction in that. Just keep torturing me, you bitch, she thought. The more you hurt me, the stronger you make me.
Irene settled herself in a meditative pose and picked up where she had last left off with attempting to push herself into the bars. Over the last several days, at various intervals, Zara would come into the shed and bleed someone. One of the ghosts Irene couldn’t see, a teenage girl by the sound of her voice, called Zara’s ritual “milking the cows.” The girl made soft mooing noises whenever the chain rattled on the door, announcing Zara’s arrival. The last “milking,” Zara had moved to one of the far-off cages that Irene couldn’t see from her vantage point. There had been a grim silence as Zara left; the girl hadn’t spoken since. The suppressed atmosphere of rage and despondency from the other ghosts told Irene everything she needed to know. The girl was dead—another mindless drifting cloud of smoke.
“She is killing us much faster now,” Boonsri said to Irene. “She has plans for you. She thinks she can use you to lure more ghosts from the other side. Word had gotten out here; there weren’t many ghosts to begin with, but those that there are won’t go near this place. But now…” Boonsri let the words hang in the air.
Irene focused, pushing Boonsri’s words from her mind. She reached out with her ghost senses and found the cold, hard steel of the bars. She pushed a little harder, focusing her concentration, until she could distinguish the feel of the metal from the feel of the ghost charms etched into them. Both had a texture or “feel,” in the way that Andras’s emotions had a feel, rather than a shape, and she could distinguish between the feel of the bars and the feel of the charms.