by Mike Allen
“Ni hao, Song Jin-Li.”
“Ni hao, Mrs. Yau.”
Mrs. Yau laughed, a throat-sung trill of touched-glass music. “I said you might feel free to call me Grandmother, child,” she reminded Jin, softly.
“Wei, I remember, and thank you, very much. But…I don’t. Feel free.”
Again, that one-eyebrow/no-eyebrow twitch, twinned with a delicate quirk of lip. “Ah. So you are finally becoming wise, mei mei—or wiser, at the very least. How it gladdens my heart to see this.”
Jin swallowed. “Did you know? About…him?”
“Your little paper husband? Not directly, no. Though I did see some sort of influence trailing behind you when you first passed my window—something foul with too much yin, like a snail’s track, leaving a stain. And seeing how you shone with yang, I thought that if that stain were to be removed from you, you might be better off.”
“That stain.” Jin’s first love. A cold and lonely thing, made only to be burnt, which had reached out blindly, grabbing at the first warm hand it found; a liar and a thief, perfectly happy to get Jin killed as long as he got something out of it. Mister Nobody No-Name Nothing…
But beautiful, nevertheless. More so, Jin feared—late at night, when she had nothing else left to think about—than anyone else she was ever likely to meet for the rest of her boringly normal life.
“Well, anyways,” she said, at last. “Looks like you saved me.”
Mrs. Yau shook her head. “No. Because you trusted in everything you saw, I simply showed you what it really was you trusted—after which you saved yourself, as I’d hoped you might. Very impressive, Song Jin-Li-ah.”
“If you say so.” Jin cracked a small smile. “Definitely lost me my summer job, though.”
“Then for that I am sorry. Would you like another, perhaps?”
“What, work here? For you? I…can’t cook, or anything.”
“Ah. Mei shi, little sister—never mind, no matter, not to worry. A restaurant holds many different jobs. Beside which, this is hardly the only business I own.”
Jin nodded. “Uh, um—no offense, but—I don’t know you very well.”
“True enough.” A beat. “Would you like to?”
“…what do you mean?”
Another beat, held longer, like a drawn breath. And: “Hmm,” Mrs. Yau asked, musingly, of no one in particular. “What do I?”
Jin felt herself trembling on some kind of precipice, with no real idea of how she might have gotten up there, in the first place—so high, so exposed. So very much in danger.
“Look closer, mei mei,” said Mrs. Yau, her lips barely seeming to move. “Look, and see. See me, now…”
…fully revealed, reigning Empress of all the New World’s hsi-hsue-kuei—suck-blood devils, half-soulled Chinese vampires, worse indeed than any ghost who ever lived once (but doesn’t anymore). Enthroned in her antipathic Dragon-boned Lady glory, and terrible as an army with banners: Her unbound mass of hair floating up and away like drowning weed, tendrils seeking delicately in every direction for any scent of blood on the air, with her porcelain mask-face the one seed of light still left in this whole black velvet poison-flower. Lotus feet in tiny jade-green slippers, curled and atrophied like mushrooms; nine-inch nails girt with golden sheaths so long, so sharp they scratched the tablecloth beneath as she gestured, cut the air around her, made it bleed. And worst of all, what might be a train or even a tail switching drily under the table, its jewel-scales rustling along the floor like toxic leaves…
Best to leave Yau Yan-er alone, Jin-ah—it’s safer. She’s NOT like us. Not like—
(anyone)
My Hell Friend, Jin thought, unable to stop herself. My REAL Hell Friend
“And now, as the old tale goes, you have seen the witch in her true ornament,” Grandmother Yau Yan-er said, softly. “For we are seldom any of us what we seem, Song Jin-Li-ah, as you will always do well to remember. Perhaps you too will be something other than you seem, in time.”
A ghost; the idea came to her, numbly—maybe that, yes. Everyone would be a ghost, eventually, after all.
Everyone but Mrs. Yau.
“Thank you,” Jin said, again, bowing her head. As was only polite.
“You are most welcome. And remember this, too: You may still return to see me yet—when you are older, perhaps, and have come into your full power. Whenever—if ever—you feel most…comfortable.”
“And how will you be then, Grandmother, if I do?” Jin-Li Song was unable to stop herself from asking, no matter how she tried—lips tight around the question, mouth dry and strained, as though the words themselves were carved from salt.
But Grandmother Yau Yan-er just inclined her beautiful head further, obviously seeing no insult was intended. And murmured, so softly it might only have been to herself—
“Oh, me? As to that, I will probably be…”
…much the same.
BRAIDING THE GHOSTS
C.S.E. Cooney
That first year, when Nin was eight, she wanted her mother so desperately. But Noir was dead, she was dead, and would always be dead, thanks to Reshka.
Reshka liked to say, “I’m not above keeping ghosts in the house for handmaids and men-of-all-work. There must be ghosts for sweeping, for scrubbing, ghosts for plunging the toilets or repairing the roof, ghosts to fix the swamp cooler and to wash and dry the dishes. But,” said Reshka, “but I will be damned—I will be damned and in hell and dancing for the Devil—before I summon any daughter of mine from the grave.”
So Reshka had Noir cremated three days after her death. Afterward, she prepared the funeral feast in Noir and Nin’s small apartment kitchen.
“This is a family affair,” she told Nin, who sat numb at the table, feet dangling above the floor. “This is a meal no ghost may touch.”
Instead of salt or herbs, Reshka scattered ashes over the meat. The buttered bread and the broccoli she dusted with Noir’s remains. Ash in Reshka’s wineglass, and in Nin’s chocolate milk.
The taste never left Nin’s mouth. Everything she ate or drank after that was death and dust—but it was also Noir. So Nin ate and drank and did not complain.
When they drove away from the apartment where Noir had quietly died, Nin did not cry. She sat with the black cat Behemoth purring on her lap, and she looked out the window, her thoughts a great buzzing silence.
Behemoth was warm and indolent, matted at the back, soft at the belly. A large cat at full stretch, he possessed the ability to curl up into improbably kittenish proportions. Now, though he seemed asleep, his tail danced. Like most cats, Behemoth was a very good liar.
Nin stroked her mother’s cat, playing catch with his clever tail. She had nothing else of Noir’s. Reshka had sold it all, or given it to Goodwill.
The sunlight glinted off a crack in the windshield, lancing her dry, dry eyes. Ahead, the road sign read, Lake Argentine, 2 miles.
Nin was pretty sure they had hundreds of miles to drive. Reshka said at the outset that they wouldn’t arrive at Stix Haunt ’til midnight. But at the Lake Argentine exit, they swerved off the freeway and jounced down the narrow lake road. Reshka offered no explanations. Nin did not ask. Something in her grandmother’s tight, pink, unpleasant smile put a padlock to Nin’s curiosity.
Noir used to tease her daughter about her constant questioning, saying, “Nin, my love, you live in the Age of Information—just Google it!” This, even if all Nin asked was, “What’s for dinner?”
But Reshka was not Noir. Noir who had died with wrinkles on her brow and bruises under her eyes. Reshka’s face was perfectly made up, in peaches and corals and cream. Her complexion had neither the flush nor pliancy of flesh, but seemed to ring like pure hard porcelain. Her hair, plaited into two dozen tiny braids, was golden in color, but of a bright and brittle gold, like autumn oak leaves that rattle juicelessly from jaded stems. Nin could not understand how a woman with no wrinkles or gray hairs could be the mother of Noir.
Noir’s last wor
ds?
“Nin—my love. Have I. Told you. About your…grandmother?”
If tissue paper had a heartbeat, that was Noir’s heartbeat. When cobwebs breathed, they exhaled more vigorously than she. Nin touched the hem of Noir’s nightgown. Contact with any part of Noir’s skin made her cry out.
“Her name is Reshka.” For comic effect, to make her mother’s eyes smile, Nin rolled her own, the way Noir did whenever mentioning Reshka’s name. “She lives in a place called Haunt and you two do not get on.”
“No—we never…did.” Noir’s voice was shy of a whisper. Still it laughed. “Nin. Come. Close. Hand…shears?”
Nin brought the shears. Noir could not close her fingers over the handle.
“I’ll do it,” Nin said. “What do you want cut?”
Noir told her, and Nin performed the small, bloodless surgery.
“Keep,” Noir said. “Hide it. Don’t…Reshka.”
“I won’t tell her.”
Nin did not ask why Reshka must come; of course she must. Under her mother’s bright, fading gaze, she put the curl of gray hair away, in an envelope, in a plastic bag, in a metal box. Which rode in the truck with Nin now, in her ratty old Superman backpack.
Reshka’s truck humped along the lumpy lake road. The sun shone on gentle hills and flashed on the rumps of small wild things running. Reshka drove her truck right up to the gravelly shore, her tires rolling over the bravest waves. Then she turned off the ignition.
Without looking at Nin, Reshka said, “Give me the cat.”
Bemused, a little sleepy, Nin did so. Reshka opened the driver’s side door. “Stay here.”
Nin stayed. She watched her grandmother walk, straight-legged in her high heels and stockings, into Lake Argentine. Reshka walked into the lake as if she did not see it, stopping only when the hem of her tea-length linen skirt began to drag the waters. Nin stayed, watching, as Reshka squatted suddenly, and with one violent thrust slammed the black cat Behemoth into the lake water and held him under.
The world whited out. Nin clawed her seat belt. She heard herself breathing in ragged gasps. Her thoughts raced ahead of her body, already diving down beneath the lake.
“No!” she shouted. But she was sealed in the truck, and Reshka did not hear. “No!” she shouted anyway, scrabbling for the lock on her door. Finding it, she flicked it up and spilled out onto the shore. The stony ground cut her bare feet. Nin ignored the stones, her feet, the blood, everything but running, dashing into the water.
“No!” she screamed, dividing air and water in a breaststroke. “No, you can’t!”
Reshka was not a large woman and Nin was tall for her age. She leapt onto her grandmother’s back, pummeling and kicking and scratching and shrieking.
“Stop it! Stop! Please! Give him back! Give him back!”
But her grandmother remained solid in her squat, both arms straight down and rigid, showing no strain though surely the black cat Behemoth struggled. No sign of the writhing thing in her hands or on her back fretted Reshka’s artful and implacable face.
When the deed was done—Nin still screaming—Reshka stood up, abrupt and smooth, the way she had gone down. This overset Nin, who fell backwards into the lake. Green water closed over her, cool and silent.
Nin thought, Just let me stay.
One-armed, Reshka hauled her out. One-armed, Reshka forced Nin upright, her polished yellow claws sunk into her shoulder.
“Hey, you!” Reshka said, shaking her. “You!”
She slapped Nin on one cheek, then the other.
“None of that from you!” she said, slapping her mouth. Until the blow fell, Nin had not realized she was still screaming. Had been, even underwater. Even choking.
“Listen!” ordered Reshka, sounding more exasperated than angry. “Listen to me, you.” Her voice, like her fingernails, was older than her face and hair. It was old and dry and it shook.
“Cats can’t abide ghosts,” she said. “Nor do ghosts bide well with cats. I’d keep a crazy household if I kept a live cat at Stix Haunt. Here.” And Reshka thrust something soggy and awful and dead into Nin’s arms. “Put it in the truck bed. If it bothers you so much, I’ll give it a raising up when we get home. It’ll be just the same, only you won’t have to feed it.”
Nin clutched the sodden black drowned dead thing close to her chest.
“He won’t be just the same!” Her raw voice carried weirdly across the water. “He’ll be dead! He’s dead! And you killed him! I won’t let you touch him! I’ll burn him first! I’ll burn him myself!”
“Suit yourself, Little Miss Nin It’s My Whim,” said Reshka coolly.
Nin turned her head and spat.
Later, she came to wonder if burning was what her grandmother had intended all along. She was to discover that Reshka considered it beneath her dignity to bind and braid the ghosts of dumb animals.
* * *
Life before Reshka had been quiet. Life after Noir was silent.
Noir used to say, “Let’s have an hour of quiet time, Nin, my love. Read if you want, or draw. Mama’s just going to lie down and shut her eyes.”
But at Stix Haunt, all hours were quiet. The house was a sprawling shamble of gray stone and stucco, with peeling columns, peaked roof and dark cupola, its rotten porches and balconies webbed all about with decrepit scrollwork. It could not have been more different from that cozy, shabby apartment in the city. Woodland and wetland bordered the property on all sides. Only one dark road under dark trees led to a small town that did not like to remember it had a Haunt at all.
Nin never saw Reshka sleep, never caught her still or off her guard. Reshka prowled the house and grounds day and night. Making her rounds. Check the saltshakers for sugar and the shampoo bottles for honey. Was there superglue in the conditioner? Was there sawdust in the Quaker Oats? Sometimes the ice cube trays were full of flies. Sometimes the meat crawled with maggots.
Because sometimes the ghosts got things wrong.
“Death doesn’t cure stupidity,” Reshka was fond of saying. She did not talk to Nin much, and tended to repeat herself when she did. “Death makes a dumbie dumber. So keep your eyes open!”
Nin did not think the ghosts were stupid. She thought maybe they were angry. Or, scarier still, that they had a sly, prankish sense of humor. Or both.
Many nights Nin went to bed short-sheeted or with crickets in her pillowcase. She was careful not to gasp or laugh or do anything to draw attention. She did not want the ghosts to notice her at all.
Reshka depended on them for everything. They drew her bath and chose her clothes, groomed her, perfumed her, prepared her meals. They did what they were told, silent and unseen, slight freezing breezes in Reshka’s great grey house.
The first year was the hardest. Nin was always cold, and her skin—especially her face—was chapped. Asleep or awake, she wept. And she was not awake often.
The second year, she started reading again. The few books she owned palled quickly, so Nin stole Reshka’s, who had hundreds but never touched them. Reshka did not own a TV. She had a dinosaur of a computer that she kept unplugged most of the time. It had a dial-up connection that she used when ordering food or clothes online. Delivery vans dropped the boxes at the gate and never ventured an inch beyond it.
The mistress of Stix Haunt had little contact with the outside world. Nin had none.
When Nin was not reading, she wrote letters to Noir. She drew pictures of live cats and dead grandmothers. She never spoke. Most days she slept. Not in her bed, which, due to the ghosts, was not to be trusted, but out under the willow tree. This was where Nin had buried the little curl of Noir’s hair, safe in its white envelope, the envelope sealed in a plastic bag, and the plastic bag placed in a metal box. A small grave. Nin’s special place.
The willow tree marked the boundary between Reshka’s ghost-kept gardens and the wild Heron Marsh that ruffled and rippled and sprawled beyond. It was not quiet beneath that green umbrella. There were flies and mosquitoes a
nd curious bees. Bird chatter and squirrel quarrels drifted down like leaves, and the marsh grass hissed under a constant low wind.
This was where Nin slept, dreaming through those first sad years. She dreamed of Noir.
* * *
“Nin, my love,” said her mother, the day after Nin’s birthday.
“Yes, Noir, my love?” Nin replied.
Noir sighed. Immediately, Nin crawled straight onto her mother’s lap, even though she was thirteen now and tall for her age.
“Nin,” said Noir, “Reshka’s going to begin teaching you soon.”
Nin grimaced. “Teach me what? She can barely stand to hear me breathe.” She paused. “But she doesn’t have much practice with people who can breathe, does she?”
“No!” Noir laughed. “She’s useless with the living. Always was.”
When Noir laughed, she threw back her head, giving her full throat to the sky. They sat on a large boulder in the middle of Lake Argentine, the waters flat as ink and cobalt blue, the sky glowing like a dome of jade above them. There was never any sun that Nin could see—only her mother, who sometimes seemed to glow.
“Listen.” Noir stroked the nape of Nin’s neck. “Reshka will teach you the four winds. Piccolo, flute, oboe, bass recorder. She will teach you songs of luring, of binding and braiding. She will teach you how to break a gravestone and make a grave-ring. She will teach you about silver, about lilies and bitter red myrrh, for you are the last of her line, now that I am gone.”
“You’re not gone,” replied Nin in a soft voice, hugging her mother. “You’re right here.”
She bent her head and took a deep whiff of Noir’s hair. Noir wore it short and dark and curly, never long enough to braid. Her mother smelled sweet and slightly messy, like baby oil.
“My darling,” murmured Noir, tightening her arms around Nin. “How’s school?”
Nin’s laughter was rusty, like a lawnmower left out in the rain.
“I don’t go,” she said. “Reshka says school is for morons, and the bus won’t stop at the Haunt, and she won’t drive me. Everyone’s afraid of her. Reshka says sorcerers like her are revered as gods among men.”