by Alyc Helms
It might be assumed from this that I didn’t like Jim and Jill. On the contrary. I loved them. When everyone else was visiting whatever indigenous attraction deemed appropriate by our tour guide, Jill would drag Jim and I to yet another obscure little shrine that even the locals probably didn’t know about. Over tea and rice, Jill would practice her broken Mandarin with the confused owners, while Jim and I kept up a running commentary on what they might be talking about, based on gestures and my equally shoddy understanding of Cantonese. Like all good Americans, Jim only spoke one language – English – but he had a wicked sense of humor, and he adored his new bride.
Our sleek tour bus drove into the Huanglong valley just as the morning sun burned away the mist. I pressed my face to the window, rubbing it with the cuff of my coat in a vain attempt for a better view. No amount of rubbing would erase the cloud of scratches on the Plexiglass. I fidgeted in my seat the entire twisted ride up to the valley, and I was in the aisle the moment we pulled to a stop at the base of the valley. I had to make my escape before–
“Missy!” Jill’s call grabbed me moments before she did. She was slight, but daily yoga meant that every slight inch of her was superhero strong. There would be no escape.
Oblivious to my intent, Jill slung her day-pack over her shoulder and pulled me down the aisle and out of the bus.
“Good idea, getting out of here before we run into the geriatric bog,” she said. “We need to get a move on if we want to have any quality time at the tea house and still make it back before the bus leaves.”
I sighed. This is what I got for letting myself get dragged along on Jill’s other field trips. I had no good excuse for ditching her on this one.
“Tea house?” I pretended like I didn’t know her alternative itinerary inside-out. “Actually, I was thinking I’d go with the group today. After all, seeing the pools and poking around the three temples, that’s pretty much why I came to China.” A half-truth. I’d come to the Huanglong valley because of my grandfather’s stories and journal entries. I wasn’t sure how I was going to find a dragon based on this sketchy evidence, but I figured the Buddhist monastery was a better place to start asking than some obscure little tea house.
Jill waved away my protest, “You can go there tomorrow after we leave.” I’d told her of my plan to jump ship in Huanglong; the last thing I wanted was her and Jim raising a fuss over my disappearance. “Today’s our last day together, so today you’re mine. Besides, the cousins said they wanted to come, which means Gunther is coming too. It’s the cool-people group. You want to be part of the cool-people group, don’t you?”
The cousins were Anita and Claire from Suffolk, seventy years if they were a day. Gunther was a retired businessman from Hong Kong. He was sweet on Claire, which would have been adorable, except…
“He still hasn’t figured out that they’re gay?”
Jill shrugged. “Different era. He’s used to women traveling together. Probably doesn’t think anything of it. Anyways, he says he wants to keep Jim company. Save him from too much frou-ferrah.”
“He actually used the term frou-ferrah, didn’t he?”
“Maybe it’s German? Frou?”
I chuckled and let myself be dragged along. Sure, I was antsy to get started on my search, but the promise of watching Gunther trying to manly it up with tech-geek Jim was too good to resist. One more day wouldn’t kill me.
* * *
“We’re lost.”
Heads turned at my pronouncement. Gunther lowered his topographical map. Jim stopped waving his cell around in the vain hope of reception. The cousins nodded, and Jill grinned as if getting lost was just the beginning of a grand adventure.
“Maybe we should head back? We don’t want to miss the bus,” Jim ventured, earning a frown from his bride.
“We can’t do that. We’re almost there, I’m sure of it,” Jill said. “We just passed the shrine they mentioned in the directions.”
“I have not seen this fork we are supposed to follow,” Gunther said.
“To be fair, dear, we’ve passed three shrines.” Anita looked to Claire for support, but Claire just shrugged.
“I don’t mind being lost. It’s a lovely day, and we have time enough to head back before we get left behind.”
Jill’s grin brightened at this tacit support, and Gunther nodded, though the slump in his shoulders said he dearly wished to side with Jim and Anita, rather than the object of his affections. As one, all eyes turned to me.
“What’s your vote, Missy?”
Uh… when did this become my decision? “We’re voting?”
“Of course,” Jill said. “Me and Claire are for forging ahead, and Gunther’s with us. Jim and Anita are for wussing out and heading back.”
“Hey!” Jim said.
I hitched my pack, wishing I could put it down. Wishing I wasn’t still recovering from being shot so I could swap it to the other shoulder. “But even if I vote for going back, it’s still a tie.”
“Sure, but as Bridejilla, I get to cast any tie-breaking vote.” Overbearing bullies should always be this charming.
I snorted. “So, it doesn’t really matter which way I vote.”
“Course it does. You want to be on the winning side, right? Not with the wuss brigade under Captain Jim.”
“You’re going to pay for this later, Jill. In I-told-you-so’s.”
“Nope, you are. When we find the teahouse, you’re treating us all to lunch.”
“And when we don’t, I’ll buy you a nice helping of crow, instead.”
“All right!” I said before the cute got any thicker. “We still got some morning daylight to burn, and we’ve missed the monastery tour, so I say onward ho!” I pointed in the direction I was pretty sure we were headed; it was the only other direction to go besides the one we’d come from. With varied degrees of enthusiasm, the rest of our group trooped out.
A half-hour later, that enthusiasm was as beat down as the rest of us.
“I think that’s the same shrine we passed before,” Claire said. She and Anita kept flagging behind. I guess being spry at seventy only took you so far. Even I was having trouble keeping up with the power-house that was Jill. Both my shoulders were aching.
“Which one?” Anita asked with a glance at Jill. Nobody could do pointed and polite like the Brits. “We’ve passed several.”
“Not sure. All of them, maybe?”
“Has anyone thought to leave an offering? We could check for it.” Heads shook at my question.
“I think it’s time we headed back,” Jim said, taking Jill’s hand to stave off her disappointment. She opened her mouth to protest, but then she caught the glances Jim and I both gave the older member of our crew. Anita leaned against a nearby rock taking sips from a water bottle. Gunther mopped sweat from his brow with a soiled kerchief, his face red from either flushing or burning. Hard to tell. Claire poked around the dense foliage that lined the trail. It took me a moment to realize she must be looking for a private spot to take a piss.
“I suppose you’re right,” Jill said. “I’m just so bummed. I really wanted to see this place. It’s been here since… well, forever.”
“We’ll go to two places that have been around forever when we get back to Chengdu. Promise.” Jim slid his arm around her waist and kissed her temple. Anita and Gunther hid relieved looks as Jim guided Jill back the way we’d come.
“Wait!” Claire’s excited cry emerged from the forest. A few moments later, her head popped into view. She beamed at Jill, blue eyes bright. My aching shoulders twitched with foreboding.
“I found something! I think I found it!”
Jill slipped out from under Jim’s arm and skipped over to Claire before he could stop her. He sighed and followed.
“I saw a little trail,” Claire explained as we gathered, “so I went down it a way to see if I could… er… to see where it led. And there’s a neat little cottage tucked back there in a glade.”
“I knew it was
here!” Jill crowed, flashing Jim a triumphant look. She waved at the shrine behind us. “I bet that is the same one we’ve been passing, and we’ve just been going in circles this whole time.”
“Which is the beginning of her argument for why we have time to stay because it’s not as far to get back as we think,” Jim announced to no one in particular. “So we might as well save her the breath and go along now.”
Claire and Anita were already gabbing about Claire’s find, heads bowed close together. Gunther nodded along with an avuncular smile. Jim slipped his hand through Jill’s and let her drag him through the trees.
I paused at the edge of the track. Something was… off. It was similar to the feeling I got when I stepped into shadow, a tenuous gravity tugging at me that seemed innocuous, but wasn’t.
“Missy, you coming?” Jill’s voice drifted back to me.
“Y-yeah,” I called back, trying to shake off the feeling. It had clamped onto the nape of my neck and wouldn’t budge. I pivoted and glanced back at the little shrine. Our way marker.
I travel light. I don’t carry a bunch of crap around with me unless it’s necessary crap, so it took me a moment to dig a suitable offering out of my pack. I had my grandmother’s pearls, but they were going back to the dragon, assuming she existed. Assuming I could find her.
But being a magician meant I always kept a few trinkets on me for sleight-of-hand tricks. I’d picked up the scarves at a souvenir kiosk in Shanghai. They were thin silk, red and green, and stamped with gold foil carp. Cheap, but pretty in a flashy sort of way. I knotted them together and tied them around a limb of one of the little trees flanking the shrine. They fluttered in the light breeze.
I knelt before the shrine like it was the mat at my kwoon. “Uh. Ms Lung Huang? Hi. This is your valley, so I’m hoping this is your shrine. I’m Missy. Missy Masters. You knew my grandfather. Anyways, I have a bad feeling about whatever’s going on. So, if you’re listening and could offer any guidance, that would be great. Uh. Thanks!”
Totally inadequate, but the offering was meant to assuage my paranoia as much as anything. Rising from my crouch, I shrugged on my backpack and trudged into the forest.
The clearing Claire had found wasn’t more than fifty yards from the track, but the foliage grew so dense that I wasn’t surprised we’d missed it. Claire must have really wanted her privacy to have wandered so far.
Scant sunlight pierced the gloom of the canopy. The clearing was limned green, like the Emerald City before Dorothy removed her spectacles. I wrinkled my nose against the moldy smell, which was punctuated by a sharp, rancid stench from the half-rotted pile of refuse edging up against the side of a shack that huddled in the middle of the clearing.
There was nothing quaint or appealing about the shack. The walls were a patchwork of rough wooden planks, cobbled stone, and corrugated tin. The structure listed to one side; the roof looked like it was about to slide into the compost heap.
“Missy, come meet the owners!” Jill waved me to the entry, where everyone had gathered. They parted as I approached, revealing a bent old hag and her equally bent… husband? Man-servant? Troll? I like to think I’m egalitarian about my standards of beauty, but these folk would have been outliers on almost any scale.
The woman reached out a clawed hand to grasp mine. She had some sort of skin ailment that turned her flesh scabrous and even more greenish in the dim light. Up close, she smelled worse than the trash pile. I expected missing teeth when she smiled, but instead was treated to gleaming rows of teeth, serrated like a shark’s. I glanced around at my friends, but everyone else smiled along with her as if nothing was amiss.
“Jill tells me you find us on the Internet. This is good. You follow directions, you find us. We make you tea. Come inside.”
Non-plussed, I let myself be dragged into the hovel. Of all the anomalies, the fact that she spoke understandable, if broken, English was the most unsettling. Jill and the rest followed us in, all of them still grinning like Stepford tourists.
The inside of the hovel was bigger than it should have been, but that’s about all it had going for it. The stench of rancid garbage and moldy mushrooms hit me square in the gag reflex. I closed my mouth and tried not to breathe too much. A cloud of gnats rose into the air at our entry, their individual forms visible only when they flew near the single lantern that hung from the loft crossbeam. The corners of the room remained in shadow, but with my improved vision I could see… things. Moving. I wasn’t sure what, and I didn’t want to know.
“Oh, how lovely!” the cousins exclaimed together. It was eerie, how similar they looked, hands clasped to their chests, dopey smiles on their faces.
“Sit, please. I will make tea.” The old woman waved us to a long, low table flanked by ratty cushions. The man-thing trundled past us and settled into one of the corners to glower at us. He licked his lips, and I caught a glimpse of teeth, sharp like the woman’s.
“Jim,” I hissed as he moved to his seat. “Don’t you think we should leave soon? You don’t want to miss the bus, do you?”
“Hm?” His smile faltered for the briefest moment, then returned. “Oh, it’s no worry. Mrs Hu says we have plenty of time.”
My friends settled at the table, blind to the skittering of insects, the creepiness of the whole situation. This was not good.
“Have a seat, dear, while I make the tea.” Mrs Hu’s tone this time was a little less sweet.
I clutched the strap of my backpack and edged toward the door. “If you don’t mind, I thought I’d take a look around outside before tea. Stretch my legs a bit.” As if I hadn’t just spent the whole morning walking. The hag’s beady eyes narrowed. “I thought I spied a garden around the side. I’d love to take a closer look at it.” That mollified her. Whatever illusion the old hag had created, it must have included a garden. Probably where the compost heap sat rotting. I slipped out before she could stop me.
I didn’t go far. I trudged over to the trash heap and pretended to admire it while my mind raced.
“You’d be best served by leaving them to their fates.”
Jerking around, I scanned the brush to see who had interrupted my growing panic. I caught a flash of russet at the edge of my vision. I looked up
Perched on one of the mossy eaves, pink tongue lolling between sharp canines and black lips, sat an amber-eyed fox. She – at least, the voice had been female – had the same predator’s grin as the old hag’s in the hut.
“OK, this is going to sound crazy, but did you just speak to me?” I asked the fox.
She didn’t respond for several moments, just panted at me and blinked like a dumb animal, then: “Oh, you don’t know how tempting it was to keep quiet and let you think you’d gone mad.”
My knees nearly gave out when she spoke, canine jaw moving in ways no canine jaw was meant to move. Happily, my knees held, otherwise I would have been rolling in rancid compost. I gathered up the shreds of my composure and shut my mouth before a fly decided to go exploring.
“You’re… a kitsune?”
She growled low in her throat. “Huxian, please.” A tail flicked with a flash of white, and my eyes were drawn to three other tails that lay dormant. Four tails. That didn’t bode well. “Now, may we stop wasting time? I’d like to guide you away from this festering pit so I can go back to my much more interesting and important business.”
I took a step back. “Why would you help me?” Whatever she called herself, she wore the guise of a trickster. And she talked like a trickster. And only idiots trusted tricksters. Right?
“Why, indeed?” The huxian cocked her head, golden gaze unblinking. When I blinked, she turned her back on me, all four tails thumping impatiently. “You asked for help, and I was sent. I suppose you may ask for different help and see what comes next.”
“But… my friends.” That was my biggest concern. I could deal later with the weirdness of talking foxes and evil hags who wanted to eat me. After all, this was what I’d come to China to find.
The vixen nuzzled at some imaginary dirt on her paw, lapping it clean before she deigned to answer. “They’re lost. There’s no way to break the yaoguai’s curse from the outside. Count yourself lucky that you were protected, and let’s go.” She hopped to the ground and trotted across the clearing. She paused and glanced over her shoulder, one paw raised, when I didn’t follow.
“What will she do to them?” I asked.
“What do you think?” It was impressive, how much derision could be put into a look, especially in a long-nosed canid face. But she was right to be disdainful. I’d seen those pointed teeth. I knew what they were for.
“I’m not leaving them.”
Her whiskers quivered as she frowned. “Take it from one who knows this world better than you: your friends are already lost.”
“But they’re not dead yet.” I turned back to the door. As I reached for the cracked plank that hung askew on the frame, the fox behind me spoke.
“Wait.” She let out an exasperated huff. “If you’re really set on trying to save them, you’ll have to set aside Lung Huang’s protection. The yaoguai’s illusions have to be fought from within.”
I gave her a pathetic, hopeful look. Trickster or not, she clearly had a better idea of what was going on than I did. And she seemed more willing to help than she pretended. “How do I do that?”
“Fighting them from within? I doubt you’re bright enough. But to cast aside the protection, just eat whatever she gives you. That should be strong enough to break the ward. Assuming you can choke it down.”
Having seen the inside of the hovel, I had to admit I shared the fox’s doubts. “And then what?”
“And then you’re on your own. I’ll wait for you at the shrine. If you’re able to make your way there, I’ll guide you back to mortal realms.”
“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to help me defeat her…” I asked, giving the fox my friendliest smile. Her return smile wasn’t so friendly.
“Happily.” She darted forward and nipped me. Hard.