by Unknown
Water-Gordon ran straight at first, then started dodging round corners. Watery shapes materialised around him, sketching his environment. A narrow street, a back yard. Water-Gordon climbed an out-house roof, squeezed through a window. Now he was in a room. A figure lay on a bed, head buried in pillows. He too was made of water. Water-Gordon placed the bottle on the floor by the bed and stripped off his clothes. Undressed, his chest looked deeper than Fran remembered, his legs thinner. It was hard to tell when he was made of mist.
Now water-Gordon was naked but for the gloves and the hat and scarf. He removed the gloves first, laying them beside the bottle. Then the hat. Finally the scarf.
The naked man wasn’t Gordon. It was Robbie.
For a moment, Fran thought the old man had paused the vision again, the scene was so still. She was still too, her heart stopped in her chest.
Then the sleeping man turned over. Even made of water, his features were unmistakeable. Here was Gordon, unconscious and innocent, just as he’d been all the time his older brother had been stalking the night in his clothes, throwing nitric acid at his girl.
The water splashed back into the spring. The liquid brothers – water-Gordon and water-Robbie – evaporated.
Something like a landslide crashed through Fran, undermining everything she’d taken as truth. All the memories she’d tagged as real. It wasn’t Gordon who’d attacked her. It was Robbie. Gordon had gone to prison while the real attacker remained free; was still free. Worked beside Fran every day. Drove her home. Told her he thought the world of her, that he’d always watch out for her. That, as long as he was around, she had nothing to fear.
She glanced back at the tunnel. Robbie was gone.
‘Do you still want to forget?’ said the old man. He beckoned her forward. She came, feeling as if all the separate parts of her body were detaching themselves from each other. He took her hand and suddenly she was seeing out of different eyes. His eyes. She saw the cave walls shrinking around her, saw a thousand ghostly figures moving through a writhing mist: people from all ages, both here and not. Memory or ghost, she couldn’t tell. The figures multiplied, overlaying each other until they were the fog and the fog was them. Finally she could see nothing at all, not even herself. There was an overwhelming pressure in her chest: she’d been breathing in and in and in and had quite forgotten to exhale. She felt impossibly full, impossibly light, as if at any moment she might free herself from the tyranny of gravity and float away.
At last she could hold her breath no longer. She breathed out the air in her lungs, and the strange feelings with it. By the time she took another breath, she was almost herself again.
‘Can you do that?’ she whispered. ‘Make me forget.’
‘Forgetting is what I am here to do. That is what this night is for. You can join me, if you choose.’
The old man’s face materialised in front of her. The fog of figures melted away. The cave returned. His face looked pinched. Not forty thousand wrinkles but eighty. An entire geography eroding before her eyes.
‘Will I forget everything?’ His eyes were suns. To stare at them too long would blind her. She looked at her scars instead. They were all that was left of her.
‘That is up to you. You can excise the painful parts. Keep the rest. I, however, must forget everything. I must make room, you see. The time has come to start again.’
One hundred and sixty thousand wrinkles. Green steam everywhere. The water boiling in the spring.
‘I don’t know,’ said Fran. ‘I need more...’
‘Time?’ Three hundred and twenty thousand wrinkles. A face like a glacier collapsing into the ocean. ‘None remains.’
Something thumped into Fran, knocking her all the way across the cave and into the far wall. She stumbled, nearly fell, recovered herself.
Two figures were grappling inside the geyser of steam: the old man and Robbie. Robbie swung the shovel he’d retrieved from the entrance tunnel, aiming it right at the old man’s head. The old man parried with his staff. He was surprisingly quick, surprisingly strong. They looked like knights in combat.
Robbie head-butted the old man. His lips were drawn back, exposing his teeth. Fran had never seen fury in him. He’d always seemed so gentle. Blood gushed down the old man’s face, a flash-flood transforming the wrinkles into dark rivers. Fran cried out.
Robbie jabbed at the old man’s face with the shovel, but Fran’s shout had distracted him and the blow went wide. The old man brought up his staff and the shovel’s blade lodged in the slot. The old man twisted the staff and the blade broke off. Rust rained like red snow through the hissing steam. With his free hand, Robbie seized the staff ... and froze.
Gasping for breath, the old man wrested the shovel handle from Robbie’s grip and tossed it across the cave.
‘I cannot do this on my own,’ he called to Fran over the relentless whistle of the steam. ‘Someone has to help. That is the way of it. Will it be you or him? The choice is yours.’
Fran stared at her scars. For two years, all she’d wanted to do was forget that terrible night. Forget Gordon, forget the attack, forget all of it, both the act and its legacy. The memories were scars. Smooth them out. Make them gone. Be who she would have been if none of the bad things had ever happened.
‘But would I still be me?’ she said.
The old man said nothing. His face was a flooded terrain, six hundred and forty thousand wrinkles filling up with blood.
***
It was one hundred metres to the entrance cave, give or take. Fran covered it in around twelve seconds. Halfway there she dropped the frying pan. It was just getting in the way.
She burst from the tunnel at a dead sprint, a fraction ahead of the wall of dust and pulverised rock that was pursuing her. She kept running, vaulting the low fences defining the leisurely route of the zigzag path and plunging straight downslope. It was insanely steep. In the night and the fog she could see next to nothing. She could hear the cliffs coming down behind her.
Abruptly the slope levelled out. Her feet hit the flat concrete of the promenade with a jarring thud. She ignored the sudden pain in her shins, scrambled up and on to the sea wall. Without hesitating, she launched herself into space. Was the tide in or out? Whichever, it was a long way down.
She landed on dry sand, tumbled, picked herself up, carried on running. The sound of the landslide was immense, the bellow of some monstrous creature. A giant bear, perhaps. She felt the breath of it on the back of her neck. Tiny stones pattered in the sand around her. The fog was clogged with dust.
Icy water splashed over her trainers. She could go no further. She turned and started running along the shoreline. Gradually the roar of the landslide faded, replaced by the whisper of the waves.
Fran stopped. She looked back. There was little light and the air was nearly opaque; even so, she could see the shape of it. Where the cliff had stood there was now a gap in the skyline. A mountain of debris spanned the beach, pointing out to sea as if the land had extended a finger. Jutting from this new promontory were the twisted remains of the cliff lifts, Victoria and Albert. Fran guessed the restoration project was probably dead in the water.
There was no sign of either Robbie or the old man.
She kept moving, finally reaching the dunes at the beach’s western end. Sunrise brought a strong wind to chase away the sea-mist. The dust continued to stain the glowing dawn air.
Up on the road, emergency vehicles began to arrive. The police made hand signals to each other across the gap that had opened up in the cliff but otherwise seemed bemused. What precisely were they expected to do?
By now Fran was freezing. Her hands were blue, the scars white. She had no urge to move. Where would she go? Her apartment was gone. The hotel too. Home and workplace, both swallowed. There was just her left.
A figure was walking towards her across the sand. No, striding. He was slim, dressed in jeans and a leather jacket. Boyish hair flapped in the wind. He was carrying her frying pan.
Cold
horror seized Fran’s spine. It was Robbie. How had he survived? She should move, run. But she couldn’t.
He drew nearer. The clothes were Robbie’s but the man inside them wasn’t him. Her body relaxed.
His skin was unlined by care or age. His eyes were bright. Too bright. Like tiny diamonds. The sort of eyes that one day might become blazing suns.
‘It’s you,’ she said, ‘isn’t it?’
‘I ... don’t know,’ said the man slowly. ‘I don’t remember.’
‘Do you know my name?’ He shook his head. ‘Do you know your own?’
‘I don’t remember anything.’ A frown settled on his brow, somehow failing to crease his flawless skin. ‘I don’t remember anything at all.’
‘That’s mine,’ said Fran, pointing at the frying pan.
He looked down. ‘Can I keep it?’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. I just ... I have to carry something.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t remember.’
He touched her hands. His fingers were warm on her cold skin. ‘You were hurt.’
‘It was a long time ago.’
The young man nodded as if he understood. Fran had no idea if he did. She wasn’t sure she did herself.
‘Your face looks familiar,’ he said. ‘Do I know you?’
‘We met once. We helped each other.’
‘I don’t remember you then. But ... I think I’ll remember you now.’
Bowing, he kissed her hands. He smiled. A single crease appeared in his flawless skin, just beside his right eye. A wrinkle, just one. Soon, Fran supposed, there would be more. In the end, thousands, if not millions.
She was glad the first one belonged to her.
He walked away down the beach. Somehow a frying pan wasn’t in the same class as a scythe. But he carried it with pride.
Fran headed for the path that would take her through the dunes to the road. She had a busy day ahead. She’d never visited a prison before. She wondered if Gordon would agree to see her. She wondered how deep his scars were.
She looked at her hands. The acid burns were still there. In the dawn light they didn’t look so bad.
Pulling down her collar so she could feel the wind on her neck, Fran walked back into the world.
Dragon-Form Witch
Joyce Chng
She backs away from the dagger, as if it is a live snake, like one of the painted bronzebacks basking in the garden. The dagger is shaped like a Lung, its body a wavy and sharp blade. Its hilt is all taloned claws.
And its pommel is its head. Green jade gives its eye an unnatural ethereal cast.
‘Take this,’ ah-ma says. ‘It’s yours now.’
‘No…’
She stares at the blade as it rests lightly and flat on her open palm. It feels warm. The blade belonged to her grandfather. The blade is her grandfather. His blood and soul were part of what forged it.
She is Lung, like ah-ma. But holding a dragon-form dagger unnerves her. Using it as her ritual athame terrifies her.
‘Take this. Fight the darkness for us.’
She sees ah-ma’s dragon form – a silver ti lung – curling up before her. This earth lung is old, weary. Fierce eyes pin her down, like an eagle eyeing its prey. She blinks and she sees ah-ma’s frail elderly body once more, clothed in dark blue samfoo and pants.
‘I can’t…’ She whispers, knowing that her excuse will be ignored. She has spent the whole of her childhood coming up with excuses.
The darkness comes at her, fast, a black oily blur.
She has no time to perform the lengthy ritual to call the four dragons. All she does is to hiss a quick prayer and visualise a flaming circle around herself. Her Wiccan mentors will laugh at her. She is mixing and merging different traditions together.
The four dragons are wholly hers. The orange-hued dragon for the East, the watery-blue dragon for the West. The North dragon, all ice and winter, came to her in a dream, a tian lung wreathed in icicles and frost. It’s the controller of winter storms, its tail the relentless sweep of winter winds. The South dragon is all fire, like the flames from ah-ma’s paper money offerings, swirling bright and hot.
But, not now. She has no time.
The darkness has a gaping maw for a mouth. She has heard her ah-ma and aunts call this type of darkness a ‘hunger’. They prey on emotions, almost like the jiang shi who eats blood.
She draws her athame, sweeps it in an arc, keeping it in front of her. She made Kim teach her the basics of dagger play and even then, she has probably messed up all of them.
The dagger cuts a vivid red curve in the air and power rushes up her right arm, like fire, like ice. With a roar like an earthquake, the red form of a ti lung emerges from the dagger, claws out and fanged jaws bared. Its beard flows like the back-draft of fire. She is filled with immense power.
‘Come at me,’ she challenges the darkness and her voice resonates. Her grandfather bolsters her strength.
The darkness screams. It wants to eat her, but is wary of the fire and magic. It knows who she is and what she is capable of.
She doesn’t wait for it to react. She launches herself at it, all black, night given form, her dagger slashing downwards. Its tip pierces it and burns its way through. The darkness’s howl fills her ears. She doesn’t care. She feels as if she is on fire, a huo lung in flight.
When she hits the ground, the darkness dissipates. The howl of pain lingers in the air. There is the smell of burning and ash.
She breathes hard, trying to stop the vertigo and the sudden weakness in her limbs. Her head throbs, slowly transforming into a migraine.
Her phone beeps. Iron Man, by Black Sabbath. Her favourite ringtone. It is loud in the silence.
‘Yin Tian. Come home. Very urgent.’
Her mother.
She settles down gracefully at the water’s edge, calmed by the mirror-flat surface. The night whispers about her. Lights, like fireflies so rare in Singapore now, sparkle about her. Somewhere she hears the throb of techno and smells the whiff of barbequed chicken wings. A girl’s soft giggle comes from the grove of Portia trees, followed by soft masculine murmurs. She loves the night and it loves her back.
‘You are early tonight.’ The ice-cold hand touches her shoulder and she looks up to see the water spirit looming above her. She can see the stars and a random passing plane through the transparent figure.
‘I was relieved early from my duties,’ she explains, always feeling edgy around the water spirit. The spirit flows, like the slow cascade of clear water. It moves in the shape of a woman, the shape it wants to be seen by mortal eyes.
‘No more deaths,’ the water spirit whispers softly and ripples as if it shudders in revulsion. ‘I am glad. Stopping the hungers tires me.’
‘Thank you for your help.’
The water spirit sighs. ‘The hungers were drawn to the sadness. So much sadness, so much pain. Your people are in pain. Can they find solace?’
She remembers all the news in the papers. The suicides. The drownings. A society in flux and eating itself from inside out.
‘No.’
‘Why? There is so much beauty here. Why is there pain, little mortal?’
The throb of techno grows suddenly loud and there is drunken laughter, a sharp-pitched yelping. She feels the change of atmosphere, the feeling of hunger in the air, the emptiness in her stomach. She stiffens, almost reaching for her dragon-form athame in her pocket. She finds it difficult talking about money and the pursuit of fleeting happiness. She hates being who she is, feeling their hunger, feeling their need.
The water spirit’s face moves, dipping inward, its way of showing a frown. ‘I have to go. The hungers awake. You need to stop them from going in. The hungers feed more and they demand more.’
She stands up, her feeling of peace gone. In the distance, she knows the darkness waits for its meal.
Ah-ma looks as if she is sleeping, her face serene and still.
She
can only stare at those ageless features, unable to cry. Nearby, the clan has assembled. Her mother, her aunts and uncles. They are not crying. They are after all a stoic family.
In her jean pocket, the dragon-form dagger trembles. She pulls it out and looks at it. The green eyes are seeping water. Somewhere, her grandfather is crying.
‘She’s gone,’ her mother places a gentle hand on her shoulder. ‘Gone to the Celestial Court to guard the Emperor. Be happy for her.’
Somehow, she remembers happier times, her grandmother teaching her how to make dragonbeard candy.
Somehow, she remembers the patient voice of ah-ma, reciting the Lotus Sutra.
She holds up the dagger and the jade eyes drip tears.
I will not cry. I will not cry.
Yet, as she sits beside ah-ma’s body, her fingers curled around the dagger, drawing strength from it. It will be a long night. Her aunts have already started burning paper money. The smoke swirls up like dancing tian lung. Perhaps, mother is right: ah-ma is gone to protect the Emperor.
Definitely changing colour.
She pats the streak of lighter hair, amused. It is a coppery red and obvious to the naked eye. Her teachers will surely see it.
The smells of dinner drift along the corridor. Fried fish. Sizzling garlic. Sesame oil. The setting sun casts a golden sheen on the roof tops of the blocks of flats. It is the magical moment before night.
She inhales the aromas, glad to be alive.
A chill wind touches her skin.
Her dagger vibrates. She feels it through her bag.
A dark shadow darts away at the corner of her eye. It looks larger than the usual hungers she hunts at night. She gives chase, drawing her dagger. She passes by children who whisper gleefully: ‘Dragon, dragon, dragon.’
This one is going to be tough.
Fire creeps up her arm.
She signs her name as Mica. Kim jokes about it. She ignores it. She is called Mica online, by the coven leaders and her coven-mates across the continents. Mica is her personal name, just as Yin Tian is the name used by her elders.
She has seen her dragon form. It glitters, just as mica glitters with light reflected. She is a ti lung and the name fits.