“I didn’t think so.” A-Ma sounded exasperated. Which was unnerving, since she was, like, the soul of patience. “This is why we sent you to that school. So that I wouldn’t have to explain these things to you now.”
“Sorry,” I apologized. “It was unbelievably boring.”
“Nevertheless.” She frowned. Her face was pinched; she looked like she was in pain. “All right, then. An e gui is a hungry ghost. If a spirit is unhappy, because it died badly or wasn’t buried properly or has no descendants to perform the proper rituals, it is reborn as a hungry ghost. It has no recourse but to attack human beings if it wants its needs met. In the meantime it must feed, and that is what the ghost that was Qianfu has been doing for the past century – feeding on us, on our energy and our life force.”
“Well, if his nose is so out of joint, why doesn’t he show us where he’s buried so we can dig him up and put him in some cooler place?”
“A hungry ghost is not a rational being, Miranda. It is nothing but a whirlwind of pain and desperate craving. You can’t talk to one. You can’t reason with one.”
“Great. So how am I supposed to deal with this ectoplasmic bummer?”
“You’re not. Not alone, at any rate. Your mission is threefold – to safeguard the compass, to assist in finding Qianfu’s body, and to provide technical support.”
“Assist whom? Provide technical support to whom? And what do you mean by ‘technical support’?”
She reached over and patted my hand. “All that will be revealed in due time.”
“What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I said.”
I played the age card. “I’m sixteen, A-Ma. How can I find a bag of bones buried in an unmarked grave a hundred years ago on the Prairies? I can’t even drive.”
“Well, that’s where Brian comes in.”
“Brian?”
“Yes, Brian. You remember Brian? Your cousin?” Now she was the one being sarcastic. “He’s had his license for months now. You would have one too, if you had stopped studying long enough to take Drivers’ Ed.”
I was completely flummoxed. You have no idea how annoying Brian can be. “But he’s … I mean, I love him and all, but he’s a total goof.”
“Oh, I understand that he’s gotten quite good at digging up things,” she said, almost blithely. “Trees and such. After all, somebody’s got to dig up Qianfu and I somehow can’t see you doing that. Oh, and before I forget …” She rummaged in a pocket of her housecoat and unearthed an old-fashioned key, intricately worked, black, and about two inches long. She handed it to me.
“And this is for …?”
“The first locked door you encounter,” she told me, closing her eyes. I noticed for the first time how transparent her eyelids were, like the thinnest of trembling membranes. Guilt washed over me. Here she was, dying maybe, and instead of humoring her so that she could go to her grave at peace, I was being my usual bullheaded self, refusing to give so much as an inch. Suddenly I felt like a toad, totally crappy.
She must have sensed my mood, because she patted my hand and, without opening her eyes, murmured, “Don’t worry, granddaughter. I never expected you to accept what I had to tell you at face value. I know you, you see. I’ve known you all your life and it’s simply not in your nature. Ever since you could speak, it’s been one question after another – why, why, why? – and you’re not satisfied until you get an answer. That’s why we chose you – The Grandfather and I. Because you are curious and because you are relentless. Also, you are the only one capable of doing what is needed. I wish we could have waited until you were older, but there’s no helping that.” She squeezed my hand before releasing it. “Now, call my nurse and tell her to put me to bed. I’m tired.” Mom had finally agreed to hire a live-in nurse to take care of A-Ma; it really upset Mom to have to do that, but it had become too much for her to manage, what with Dad and my brothers.
I slipped the key into my jeans pocket and stood. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She murmured something noncommittal in response. Bending down, I kissed her forehead lightly before sounding the brass gong for the nurse and stealing quietly from the darkening courtyard.
A-Ma died in her sleep that night and was buried a few days later on the left side of The Grandfather.
As the funeral was wrapping up and people were making their way to their cars through a light drizzle, I turned to Mom. “That plot to the right of The Grandfather … should we be thinking about buying it, maybe?” I was trying to sound mature and offhand, but it didn’t come off that way – more like awkward and dorky.
She gave me a searching look, then swallowed and looked away, off toward the ocean, steel gray under a gray sky. “No need,” she said. “It was bought and paid for a long time ago.” She paused. “So … you know, then? She told you?”
“About the curse and the ghost?” I shrugged. “Yeah. She told me. Do I believe in that stuff? That’s the real question.”
“Do you?” She returned her gaze to me. The dark circles under her eyes looked like stains; they were the color of a ripening bruise. I would have assumed she knew the answer to that without having to think twice, but I was wrong. I read uncertainty in her look, and this was a woman who had graduated from university with an honors degree in Art History.
“Mom. Of course I don’t believe in curses and ghosts. Do you?”
She shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe. There has to be some reason things have gone so badly for us, some explanation –”
“I agree,” I interrupted her. “And it’s a rational, scientific one.” She looked so defeated and downhearted that my first impulse was to give her a big hug, but that would have made her feel like every bone in her body was broken and someone had poured gasoline over her and set her on fire. Instead I assured her, “I’ll do my best to find Qianfu’s bones. If that’s even possible after so long. That much I promise. I’m not sure how much good it will do in the big scheme of things, but I’ll do it.”
“It’s a lot to take on,” Mom said. “Especially for someone so young. It’s not what I wanted for you.”
It’s not what I wanted for myself, I thought grimly, but hey.
“When will you start?” she asked.
My jaw dropped. A-Ma hadn’t said anything about a start-up time, not to my recollection. “What?”
“When will you be going to Moose Jaw?”
“Moose Jaw?”
“You’ll have to go to Moose Jaw,” she said. “I can book plane tickets for you and Brian.”
Brian. Shit.
“Does he even know?” I asked. “Did A-Ma tell him?”
She shook her head. “Not yet. You know how he is, Miranda. We thought it best to wait until the time was right. So he wouldn’t get into too much trouble in the meantime.”
Great, I thought. Just what I need. A keg of dynamite with a short fuse.
“I don’t know when I’ll go,” I said. “I haven’t thought that far ahead.” The truth was that I hadn’t thought ahead at all. After all, when you’re foggy about the what of something, it’s pointless to decide on the when. “I’ve got to finish up my internship at CanBoard first … and then there’s school starting up …”
“Miranda. You have to go sometime.”
See, that was the operative idea: I had to go sometime. Not now. Not soon. But not never, either. Qianfu had been dead for over a century. Call me crazy, but I figured his ghost could probably wait until I graduated from high school before I went poking around Saskatchewan for his lousy grave. “Please, Mom. All this … it’s a lot to take in all at once, and I can’t just blow the CanBoard internship off. I can’t. If I just up and leave, it would so not look good. This internship is really prestigious. People kill for this internship. You know that.”
“All right,” she said. “But after that.”
“After that is school …”
“After that is a two-week break before school,” she countered.
“A two-week bre
ak that is my only summer vacation …”
“Miranda.” Her voice was shrill with anguish, her expression stricken. “You’re not taking this seriously. You’ve got to understand. The rest of us … we’re going downhill fast. It’s getting worse and worse. With A-Ma gone, it’s my job to hold this family together, and I don’t know if I can, not when it’s all I can do to get out of bed in the morning. You must do this and you must do it soon.”
“All right, all right,” I said, tears springing to my eyes. It was awful to see her like that, so undone. “I’ll go after the internship, before school starts. You can make whatever arrangements you want. Don’t worry, Mom. I’ll do it.”
“Thank you,” she breathed. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” I murmured, sliding my hand into the pocket of my raincoat to feel the smooth surface of the cherrywood compass case I had deposited there earlier that day. It seemed to give off a faint heat on this drab, sad day, although that, of course, was impossible. There goes my summer vacation, I thought, and if I know my cousin (and I did know my cousin), there goes my sanity as well.
I was sitting at my workstation on the twenty-third floor of the green glass CanBoard office tower, leaning back in my swivel chair and gazing out the window at the faint outline of mountains in the distance. Power views don’t come a whole lot better than the one from the west-facing windows of the interns’ office: the steep, jagged, snowcapped peaks of the Canadian Rockies, as seen from an upper story of a building so large that it takes up an entire city block of downtown Calgary, and so high that it dominates the skyline.
It was a few minutes past seven-thirty on the last night of my internship. I had just cleaned out my desk. There had been a little party for the interns an hour earlier. After cupcakes and fruit punch and balloons, the others had said their good-byes and left for the airport to catch planes to Toronto and Winnipeg and Montreal.
I stayed behind. My plane wasn’t out until the morning and, besides, I wanted to soak up the atmosphere, to bask in the knowledge that, for the moment at least, I was living out my dream. I, Miranda Liu, was well on my way to having a small part to play in transforming the world as we know it.
Yes!
It was a heady feeling and I wanted to enjoy it while I could. Live, drink, and be merry, I thought, helping myself to yet another cupcake (gooey chocolate with pink icing), for tomorrow … tomorrow I go to Moose Jaw. Well, Moose Jaw via Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan.
The thought punctured my good mood like a nail flattening a tire. I deflated, which was fairly remarkable given the number of cupcakes I had eaten.
Mom had made all the arrangements, booking my plane ticket and a hotel and a rental car. She had called to give me confirmation numbers.
“But I can’t drive!”
“Brian will drive.”
So, yes, Brian was coming. I rolled my eyes in exasperation. I was supposed to meet up with Doofus at the Regina Airport; his plane from Vancouver was due forty minutes after mine from Calgary. Then we would drive the rental car from Regina to Moose Jaw.
“What about you?” I’d pleaded. “Aren’t you coming?”
Because technically Brian and I were both minors. Surely she wasn’t supposed to let us go roaming around Saskatchewan without adult supervision.
But no. “I have to take care of Dad and Liam.” Which was true, I suppose. Both of them were super-dependent on her for pretty much everything. Besides, flying made her symptoms a lot worse. Made her even more tired. Still.
“You haven’t headed out yet?”
My heart did a little bump, before I registered the voice as both familiar and friendly. I swiveled my chair around to see Thierry Maille from Channel Development. Thierry was a Quebecer in his mid-twenties, small and wiry, with stand-up tufts of orange and blue hair – retro punk in its latest incarnation. Most of CanBoard’s employees were young, some only half a dozen years older than me, making my dream of working for the consortium in the near future not as unattainable as you might think, particularly given my test scores in Mediated Reality markup language and Web Metadata.
“Just hanging out,” I said. “My plane isn’t out until tomorrow.” Truth was, I didn’t really relish the thought of going back to the dorm now that everyone had taken off. Although I hadn’t managed to make real friends with any of my fellow interns – the pace wouldn’t have allowed for much socializing, even if I had been more outgoing – the prospect of empty rooms and silent halls made me feel a bit bummed, and a little lost. I had the feeling that I would rattle around. I hate that feeling.
“What’s that?” Thierry had spotted the cherrywood box containing the lo p’an. It was on top of the stuff I had removed from the desk and piled up in a bin for transport back to the dorm.
“It’s something my grandmother gave me. Pretty cool.” I unlatched the box, removed the compass from the case, and handed it to him.
“Wow! This is one of those feng shui things, isn’t it?”
“It’s what you call a lo p’an, a geomancer’s compass.”
He turned it over in his hand, tracing the concentric rings with his finger, peering at the Chinese characters. “What a beauty. How old is it, do you know?”
“I do,” I said, feeling a little tickle of pride. “Seventeenth century. But how do you know about this stuff? Feng shui, I mean.”
“My wife’s into it. She took a workshop.”
“Really? A workshop?” I remembered my conversation with A-Ma; how feng shui had to do with grave sites and stuff like that. “What sort of things did she learn?”
Thierry laughed. “Well, for starters, she learned that wealth escapes through open toilets, so now we have to keep the toilet lids down. My dog still doesn’t know what hit him.”
That rang a bell. When my cousin Oliver was little, he used to lope, whooping, through the house, going from bathroom to bathroom (and the Pender Street house had six of them) on this weird kind of mission he had set himself to raise all lowered toilet lids. Who knows what he was thinking? Maybe it was his idea of fun. This drove the grown-ups wild – A-Ma had insisted, insisted, that toilet seats must be down at all times (well, except when you were using them) – so off Brian would be dispatched, to close the lids Oliver had opened. And around and around they’d go, making everybody dizzy and cranky. I laughed and shook my head. What a crazy memory. “It was an article of faith in my family that the only reason we didn’t go under during the Wall Street Meltdown of ’08 was that we kept our toilet lids down,” I told Thierry. “I never realized that was feng shui.”
“Of course, there’s other stuff besides the toilet lids,” he said. “Stuff about mirror placement and the orientation of your bedroom and where you should have plants and where you shouldn’t.… You do know there’s a feng shui network on WorldBoard?”
“I didn’t.”
Well, it made sense. The last few years had seen an explosion of WebTV channels. There were cooking channels and sports channels and craft channels and cartoon channels. You name it. The difference between cable TV and WebTV channels had to do with the experience, of course – people turned on Window Walls to watch programs, while they logged onto WebTV to take part in activities through virtual reality.
“Yep. We launched it a few months ago,” Thierry replied. “Just dial into the New Age portal and key in ‘feng shui’ if you want to check it out.” He handed me back the compass. “Quite the artifact, Miranda. You’ll let me know if you ever want to sell it? Present for the wife. Can’t be too many of these around.”
I laughed. “No chance of that. It’s been in my family for a zillion years. You know how people say, ‘If I did that, my grandmother would turn over in her grave’? Well, Chinese don’t just turn over in their graves. According to my grandmother, they turn into horrible monsters and come after you.”
“Well, if you ever change your mind,” he said. “You’ve got a little chocolate …” He pointed to the right corner of his mouth.
Hu
rriedly I dabbed at my face with a crumpled party napkin.
“Got it,” he said. “I’m off now. Best of luck. I won’t say good-bye. I have a feeling you’ll be back here before too long.”
I beamed. “I hope so.” Then my heart sank. First I had to go to Moose Jaw.
After Thierry left, I swiveled back to face the window. I was about to put the lo p’an back in its box when it occurred to me that I’d never actually stopped and taken a good long look at the compass. Whatever I might think of its usefulness as a tool, it was, at the very least, beautiful and exotic. I counted the ivory rings surrounding the yin-yang symbol at the compass’s center – one, two, three … eighteen in all. Whatever that signified. And it had to signify something. For old-school Chinese, it’s all about the numbers – two means this and six means that. Then there are the lucky numbers and the unlucky numbers, and the really unlucky numbers … don’t get me started. As for what those Chinese characters inscribed on the rings meant … not a clue. They looked like so many chicken scratches to me.
I closed my eyes, leaned back in my chair, and let my fingers drift over the bumpy surface of the compass. A pop-up of Sebastian’s face as I had last seen it appeared in my mind’s eye. Summoned home from blind kids’ camp for A-Ma’s funeral, he had described to me how he was trying to master Braille before his eyesight completely failed. Blind by age thirteen. How would it be to have sight and to lose it, to know what you were missing? It made me sad. It pissed me off.
Feeling grim, I replaced the lo p’an in its case but didn’t close the lid. Instead I picked up my enviro-mote and used it to close the miniblinds and power up my computer. I logged onto the New Age portal and keyed in “feng shui.” When the screen popped up, I did a search for “geomancer’s compass.” Listed among the options was a virtual tour. I clicked on it, ticked the payment box – which let my bank access my account to pay the provider – and downloaded the tour onto a card, which I inserted in my I-spex. (One of the perks of interning for CanBoard was that WorldBoard was in the middle of beta testing I-spex. You wear them like eyeglasses instead of having a big clunky head-mounted display, or HMD, wrapped around your noggin – much lighter than HMDs and they don’t make you look like an alien, which is always a plus. Eventually everyone will have a brain implant, of course, but that’s a ways off.)
The Geomancer's Compass Page 4