Spirits Abroad (ebook)

by Zen Cho

  Grass rolled away on either side of them. There were a few buildings around, but none of them looked like canteens.

  "Where are we ah?" Hui Ann asked.

  Adeline produced a map from the depths of her puffy jacket. "Boys' dorms, I think. Canteen is all the way on the other side. We're wrong already." She pointed at the map. "Look, there's a gate here. If we go out and walk round to the front gate, should be faster to get to the canteen."

  The front gate opened on to the main road, which meandered through a minute village made up of fifteen houses and a post office before joining into the highway which had brought them here from Manchester Airport.

  The back gate led to plain old countryside. Apart from the school, there was no sign of human habitation for miles.

  Hui Ann had grown up in a suburb. The rolling fields were the loneliest thing she'd ever seen.

  "Feels so ulu, hor." Adeline craned her head to look at the sky. "I wonder if there'll be a lot of stars at night."

  Adeline thought the stars were seraphim and the twinkling came from the continuous flutter of their six wings. "They use two to hide their face, two to hide their feet, and two to fly."

  "Why don't they just use all six to fly?"

  "Must menutup aurat mah," said Adeline. "If Muslims must be modest, what more angels."

  She had a lot of weird ideas of this kind. Adeline's parents were fantastically rich — "Our house got seven car and two security guard" — but she didn't see much of them.

  "When the Currer Brundall principal asked them what grades I got in my SPM mock exam, they couldn't even answer. Not like it was hard to remember also. It was all As."

  This level of parental detachment struck Hui Ann as improbable, but not unattractive. "If my parents had that much money they'd install a microchip in my skull so they can track me wherever I go."

  "Sounds worse than mine," said Adeline doubtfully.

  "No, they're OK," said Hui Ann. "I just wish they're a bit more laidback."

  She rolled the pen clip in her hand. She should say now, get it over with, before she and Adeline became friends. They would be friends by the time they got to the front gate. If she stayed silent till then about her crime, Adeline would never know. Hui Ann would keep the pen forever and never mention it. Their friendship would be founded on a lie.

  Maybe years from now Adeline would get married and Hui Ann would be her bridesmaid, large and blowsy in blue chiffon, dripping sentimental tears into her peonies. Throughout the beautiful wedding, while Adeline smiled her naked lashless smile, the sharp edges of the clip would be notching red marks in Hui Ann's palm.

  "Thanks for borrowing me your pen," she said abruptly.

  Adeline looked relieved. She'd obviously been wondering whether she was going to get it back. "That's OK!"

  "I'm really sorry, though," Hui Ann rushed on. "I was fidgeting during the test and I just—"

  She opened her hand and showed Adeline the clipless cap.

  "Sorry," said Hui Ann.

  Adeline took the pen, her eyebrows drawing downwards. If Adeline's resting expression was anger, distress seemed to translate on her face to incandescent fury. Hui Ann was already embarrassed and the livid look on Adeline's face shook her. She stepped back.

  Her left foot went into a hollow. There was a high-pitched inorganic squeal, like the whine of rusty hinges. Hui Ann reached out, flailing, and her foot slid. She felt something snap beneath her shoe, like a twig.

  The squeal cut off.

  "Eh, you OK or not?" said Adeline, grabbing her. "Why you jump here jump there like that?"

  Hui Ann hesitated. "You looked kinda mad."

  "It's just the clip! Who cares?" said Adeline. "My face looks like this all the time! It doesn't mean anything."

  "Sorry."

  "No lah, it's OK." Adeline shoved the pen into her jeans pocket and sighed. "I'm used to it. My mom always says I should smile more."

  Hui Ann shrugged, still embarrassed. She cast around for something else to talk about.

  "Did you hear some noise just now?" she said.

  "Like a squeak, right?" said Adeline. "Did you step on something?"

  Hui Ann eased her left foot out of the hollow. "I think I felt something down there."

  She looked down.

  In the hollow, barely to be seen in the evening half-light, was the fairy. Its eyes were still open — black, glassy eyes, like the eyes of a stunned mouse. Ichor pooled beneath its body.

  It was dying.

  She had killed it.

  The next morning it was raining, and the fairies stood in serried ranks before the front gate.

  They were of varying heights and colors, but none of them were higher than Hui Ann's knee. Some of them were humanoid, but with the radiant hair, bug eyes and tiny faces of anime characters. Some of them looked like animals, but they stood upright on their hind legs, wore silks and brocades, and clutched bows and arrows in their paws.

  Some of them didn't have facial features, human or otherwise. Some of them had too many facial features.

  Hui Ann had finished breakfast and was coming out of the canteen with the other kids when they all saw the fairies. Everyone stopped in their tracks and stared.

  "What do they want?" whispered Adeline.

  "They want to kill us, probably," Hui Ann said, but she didn't speak softly enough. The group stirred.

  "What are they?" said a boy.

  "Fairies lah then!"

  "What should we do?"

  Hui Ann said briefly: "Chau."

  When the group took flight, so did the fairies. Lifting from the ground in a body, like a flock of enraged birds, they hurtled over the gate.

  The kids had tried to barricade themselves in the main hall and this had worked until the fairies came down that damned chimney. The teachers were nowhere to be seen, but a piece of paper was pinned to the door of the Pastoral Care office. On it, hastily scrawled, were the words:

  They don't like iron or running water

  Don't understand thoughts, only feelings

  They can sense your emotions

  They can die

  They have short attention spans

  GOOD LUCK

  WE ARE SORRY

  "If only we had a hose," said Adeline.

  "Teachers," said Hui Ann. "Even when they're escaping, they can't resist. Die die also must try to teach you."

  Adeline shuddered. "Let's not talk about dying."

  To Hui Ann's relief nobody had blamed her for the fact that they were being attacked by an army of enraged pixies. Instead the other kids seemed to have concluded that since she was the only one who'd managed to kill a fairy, she probably knew what she was doing. They'd followed her willingly enough to the library, and now it was her they trusted to come up with a plan to fend off the fairies.

  "They can't be that powerful, right?" said Mun Kit. He glanced at Hui Ann for confirmation. "If not, how come you step on one already it can die?"

  The shame had been forgotten amidst other concerns, but it washed over Hui Ann now. She saw again the dead fairy lying curled up in the hollow, the life seeping out of its crushed body.

  "I think it was hibernating," she said.

  "We shouldn't just sit here waiting for them to come in," said a Singaporean girl with the strange-looking but mundane-sounding name of E-Qing. "We should go outside."

  "But how're you gonna deal with the fairies?"

  E-Qing shrugged. "They're so much smaller than us. So long as we're prepared, I don't think it's a problem. We can't wait here forever. Not like we can live on Maggi mee and sambal indefinitely."

  "People brought sambal?" Hui Ann noticed people hastily squirrelling away jars of dark red paste. "You brought that all the way from home? Eh, here in England they also got food one, you know or not?"

  "I don't like fish and chip," said one of the sambal smugglers defiantly.

  "I went to the sports hall and got this," said E-Qing. She cast a shimmering array of weaponry on the f
loor — fencing epees, bows and arrows. Hui Ann's eyes widened despite herself.

  "Wow," she said. "My old school just had footballs only."

  "The arrows are tipped with metal," said E-Qing briskly. Her hairtie was the exact same shade of lilac as her shoelaces; you wouldn't think she was the kind of girl who would take so readily to war. "And the swords are made of steel, of course."

  "I brought seaweed snacks from home," chimed in another kid. "Seaweed got iron, right?"

  "I don't think the teachers meant that kind of iron," said Hui Ann.

  "We'll go out the window and come round to the front," said E-Qing. "Because all the fairies are watching the library door, they won't be expecting us. We'll take them by surprise."

  Adeline was looking worried.

  "It's a bad idea," she said. "Hui Ann, don't let them go."

  E-Qing just about held herself back from rolling her eyes. Hui Ann noticed she was also wearing lilac eyeshadow.

  "No offense," said E-Qing. "But Hui Ann's not even a prefect."

  It wasn't like Hui Ann had even had the good sense to keep them out of this mess in the first place.

  "You all go lah," she said. "But be careful, OK?"

  It was her week for bad decisions, so Hui Ann shouldn't have been surprised when the screaming started on the other side of the library door. It was all of a piece with that stupid pen.

  Adeline tried to stop her from opening the door. "E-Qing they all have swords and they can't even handle the fairies. What can we do?"

  "Wait here while they all are being slaughtered outside?"

  "Yah, I guess that's not a good idea also," Adeline conceded. "But if you open the door and the fairies come in, what's your plan?"

  "They won't come in," said Hui Ann. "You're the one who said what. It used to be a chapel. They don't like religion."

  Adeline's face crumpled. "Hui Ann, don't you know I just made that up! I was desperate!"

  "Me also," Hui Ann told her. "Not to worry. I'll come up with something. Give me the shoebox."

  In spite of her confidence her heart was banging against her ribcage when she flung the doors open and looked out into the corridor.

  The air was thick with fairies. She couldn't even see if E-Qing and the kids who had gone with her were there. It was like walking into a swarm of bees.

  As she watched in horror, the swarm reshaped itself into something even less credible.

  "It's like Power Ranger," breathed Mun Kit.

  The fairies were forming a gigantic fairy. It was like a warped cheerleading routine on a tiny scale. The small bodies piled on top of one another, fists grasping wings, legs wrapping around necks, needle-sharp teeth sinking into limbs. The surging interconnected mass developed legs, a torso, arms, and finally, a face, blooming out of the chaos.

  It was Hui Ann's own face staring back at her.

  "Like the Wizard of Oz," said Mun Kit.

  With a sudden inexplicable access of understanding, like the clarity that comes in dreams, Hui Ann saw what was happening.

  "Stop it!" she said.

  "I know, right," whispered Adeline. "It's horrible!"

  "No, not the fairies — well, yalah, the fairies also — but I was talking to him. Mun Kit, stop thinking!"

  Maybe killing the fairy meant Hui Ann understood them better. Maybe that was how you joined their fellowship. That was why they had chosen to reproduce the shape of her face — death formed a bond between them.

  "You thought it, right?" said Hui Ann. "Before you said it. You thought, 'Wouldn't it be cool if they joined together like Power Ranger to make one huge fairy.' Right?"

  Mun Kit stammered, "I don't know! I wasn't really thinking!"

  "You were thinking! You don't need words to think! Pictures count."

  Fairies didn't need words. Words got in the way. Words were a human thing. Fairies thought in pictures. No — they thought in feelings. No—

  Feelings thought them.

  The landscape has feelings. Wind can be angry and skies can be cheerful. The sun is kind or cruel, as the mood takes it. The moon mourns. Nothing is detached from emotion but God.

  Hui Ann looked into the strange little faces, unhuman, unanimal, unvegetable, unmineral. The fairies were made of strong, strong feeling. All the stronger because it was not like the feelings of human beings, diluted by thought.

  The world didn't think. Its feelings unfolded naturally from the deep places of the earth and the distant reaches of heaven.

  The fairies were rage and fear and fascination, all mixed up in a thick fog.

  If they were made from feeling, then feeling could conquer them.

  She looked down and saw black bits of paper on the floor. It took her a moment to recognize them as shredded nori, strewn on the floor by E-Qing's misguided warriors, as if trace amounts of iron might actually hold off a fairy army.

  Hui Ann knelt down.

  "What're you doing?" said Adeline.

  Hui Ann was thinking boredom.

  Her fingers fitted the bits of nori together as if they were pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Watching them, she built up the heaviest, dampest, stuffiest mass of boredom there ever was.

  The library was a good room to do it in. Centuries of tedium had soaked into the walls. The boredom of students puzzling over their books, and before that, the boredom of the small congregation, gathered to pray.

  Hui Ann hoped they'd been preached dull sermons.

  She felt her eyes begin irresistibly to close as the boredom sank into her. She pressed her fingers against the floor to steady herself, and let her mind leap out into the world.

  Hui Ann tasted the boredom of people waiting at traffic lights, people sitting in offices, people pretending to be interested at business meetings, people pretending to be interested in bed. People dosing themselves with tedium in front of TVs and computers. Tourists gazing blankly at great works of art. Powerful leaders yawning in the middle of their own improbable promises. Management consultants bored of spreadsheets and astronauts bored of outer space.

  The boredom flowed out of Hui Ann into the library and out into the corridor. It would flood the school grounds. It would roll through the sports hall, the lecture theater, the hostels, the village's fifteen houses and post office. When the tide receded, the fairies would be gone.

  Adeline gasped. Hui Ann opened her eyes.

  The air was clear. E-Qing and a few other kids were slumped on the floor, but they were alive.

  "Oh," said Hui Ann, still glazed over with ennui.

  The sun shone in through a window, casting a trembling bar of light on the wall. It was the first sun she'd seen since coming to England.

  The teachers returned with disappointing promptness. The school had hardly been fairy-free for a day before the first adult was sighted, pootling shamefacedly into view in a red Mini.

  They hustled everyone back into class immediately. Some of the kids found this a let-down. They'd been looking forward to living wild and battling fairies.

  "So childish," said Adeline. "They all were talking about going to town on Wednesday and getting iron things. Golf clubs and things like that."

  Hui Ann grinned. "Bet E-Qing wrote the shopping list."

  "She finds fairies more interesting than A-levels," Adeline agreed. "Ridiculous. It's not like the fairies are coming back what."

  "You never know."

  "But they took their guy away already," argued Adeline.

  This was true. Adeline had been clutching the shoebox, petrified, as Hui Ann sank into her trance of boredom, but not a single fairy had touched her. They'd melted away into the air with many jeers and siren shrieks. Adeline had only thought to look down when they'd vanished. The shoebox was empty.

  "They're still out there," said Hui Ann. "I think they'll come back. Too many teenagers here. We're too excitable. Everywhere else is … boring." Hui Ann shrugged uncomfortably. "I think we called them here."

  "By killing the fairy, you mean?"

  "No, all o
f them," said Hui Ann. "Fairies in general. Fairies don't exist, right? Not in the modern world anyway. Not in cities or suburbs. Not even in the countryside. I mean, look at it." She gestured at the rolling green fields. "There's nowhere to hide. No mystery.

  "I've been thinking. It doesn't make sense that I stepped on a fairy the minute we walked out that day. You'd think it wouldn't be so easy to find them. But maybe — maybe fairies are everywhere, because they're made of everything. But you can't see them unless you call them. Maybe we called them to us."

  "But why us?" Adeline said.

  "I don't know," Hui Ann admitted. "Teenagers have too many feelings, I guess."

  "That's true," said Adeline. "I'm pretty mysterious. Half the time even I don't know what I'm thinking."

  She looked thoughtful, but what she said next surprised Hui Ann. "I hope they all didn't eat the dead one or what, after they took it away."

  "Maybe that's what it would have wanted," said Hui Ann. Guilt clanged in her chest. She would never be free of it, she realized. This was something you could not fix. Hui Ann felt very old; she felt she had begun to grow up.

  "Maybe," said Adeline kindly, but she didn't sound convinced.

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  起狮，行礼(Rising Lion — The Lion Bows)

  The hotel was not like any hotel Jia Qi had seen before. There was no drive swooping around a fountain featuring little peeing babies, no glass doors opening onto a golden lobby lit by chandeliers, no men in white gloves to open the doors for you.

  Perhaps English hotels were different. This one was a blocky old building made of weathered gray stone and covered with ivy. It looked like it should come equipped with knights and pointy-hatted ladies. The manager who came out to greet them looked incongruously modern in comparison — he wore a suit and a bright red tie, but no gloves. His name was Nick.