“Why?” I demanded. “Because I’m a girl? That is so sexist.”
“No,” replied the avatar. “Girls can be just as brave as boys and boys can be just as frightened as girls. You will be more frightened because you are anxious by disposition. Brian is more sanguine; the world does not scare him so much.”
“The world doesn’t scare me,” I insisted.
The other two exchanged glances.
“What?” I demanded.
“Germs and microbes?” the avatar asked.
“How about Ebola fever?” teased Brian. “What about bugs that live in your mattress and are so small that you can’t see them without a microscope?”
The Grandfather chuckled. “As I recall, musical chairs scared you.” We’d played the game at Aubrey’s eighth birthday party and when I had lost my chair, I’d freaked out. Big deal – I was five, and it was totally nerve-racking. You would have screamed your head off too.
“To be fair, Miranda, you are not wrong to be frightened,” said The Grandfather. “The truth is that hungry ghosts are far from harmless.”
“But they can’t actually hurt you, can they?” Brian asked. “I mean, ghosts aren’t real. Not in the same way that we’re real.”
“They are not part of your reality, in the same way that I am not part of your reality,” the avatar explained, “but they are no less real than I am, and no more imaginary than you.”
“OK,” said Brian, “back up. You lost me.”
The avatar sighed. “You and I, Brian, exist in the human realm, which is based on passion, desire, and doubt. Qianfu exists in the hungry ghost realm, a kind of hell stoked by the flames of insatiable desire. You summon me into your reality by means of VR; a hungry ghost invades your reality through the extremity of its unsatisfied, all-consuming hunger and thirst, its dire and unslakable need. As for what it can do, it can frighten you to the point of madness or, indeed, to the point of death.”
I let out a little involuntary yelp – that panic attack was ready to go boing at the slightest provocation. Down, girlfriend, I told the rising tide of panic, things are freaky enough without you wigging out all over the ancestral haunted store.
Brian – seeing, no doubt, that I had turned a whiter shade of pale – thumped me on the back. “Buck up, cuz. It’s either this or that shark off Bermuda.”
“I don’t know,” I gasped, short of breath. “That shark’s starting to look pretty good.”
“Follw me,” the avatar instructed us. “Stick together and pay attention. When the time comes, do what I say. Do you understand?”
“Can I just … stay out here?”
“No,” the avatar replied. “You have to keep the connection going and make sure we don’t time out.”
“But I could do that from here –”
“No.” The avatar was firm. “We need to be able to see one another, to maintain eye contact. It’s the only way, Miranda. You must be brave.” It turned to Brian. “Brian, the door.”
Brian nodded, drew himself taller, then walked to the door, flinching slightly as he passed into the cold. He inserted A-Ma’s key into the lock. My heart began to pound like a jackhammer and my lungs seemed to shrivel inside me; I had trouble catching my breath. He had to apply a fair amount of force and both hands to turn the key; the lock was corroded. I started trembling; I felt slightly light-headed. As Brian leaned his weight against the door and pushed hard, there was the creak of rusty hinges and the door scraped slowly, screechingly open. Omigod. It sounded just like a tomb in a horror movie.
Before us lay a room perhaps fifteen feet wide and twice that long, shrouded in dusty darkness. The latticed windows to either side of the door, the sanatorium’s only source of natural light, had been boarded up years ago. The store smelled musty and dank. Again, like a tomb. Great.
“Where’s the light switch?” Brian asked, in this perfectly conversational tone.
“Brian!” I whispered. “Shhh.” Through the gloom I could just make out gaslamps on the walls, coated in a thick layer of dust. I pointed to one and shook my head. I mouthed the words, “No electricity.”
“No point in whispering,” the avatar said. It had flickered forward and now hung suspended in midair, halfway into the room. “Ghosts have excellent hearing. They can hear a pin drop across a galaxy.”
“It’s too dark,” I said nervously. “I’m going to activate the Zypad’s light source.” With trembling fingers I punched up the meter and adjusted the settings on my wearable, bathing the room in a fuzzy yellowish glow that resembled gaslight, all flickers and looming shadow – hardly the bright white light I had been shooting for, but better than nothing. I scanned the room quickly, looking for monsters. Nothing. I relaxed a little and glanced around. Maybe this is as scary as it’s going to get, I told myself. You can always hope.
The store’s side and back walls were lined floor to ceiling with shelves stacked with merchandise. Directly opposite the door was a wooden counter topped with scales and an old-fashioned, brass-plated cash register. Behind the counter and next to a door leading to a back room teetered a stack of yellow-lacquered coffins, similar to the one in which The Grandfather had been buried. (Coffins?) To the right of that door, a narrow, steep staircase climbed to the second floor.
“Would you look at all this stuff?” I marveled. Crossing to one wall, I began to randomly read labels: “Peking ducks preserved in jelly, Chinese wolfberry, bezoar …” I turned to the avatar. “What’s bezoar?”
“The hairball of an ox,” replied The Grandfather. “An excellent all-purpose antidote to poison.” It was slowly pivoting in place, cane aloft, as it used the green globe to light up the room’s dark recesses. What? I thought, shivering, my heart rattling around in my chest like a pinball. Was Qianfu’s ghost hiding in the cobwebs that hung from the high ceiling? Was it going to drop down on us like a spider?
To calm myself I continued to read my way down the shelf. “Powdered deer horn, potions of pickled wildcat, chicken, and snake, Tiger Balm…Tiger Balm?”
“Formulated in Rangoon by a Chinese herbalist of my acquaintance,” replied The Grandfather. “Good for arthritis and rheumatism, muscular and joint pains, neck and back pain, tired feet, muscular aches caused by stress and sprains.… A-ha!”
This caught Brian’s attention. He turned. “ ‘A-ha’ what?”
The avatar poked at something with the tip of its cane. “Big spider.”
Big spider?
“Cool!” cried Brian. “What kind?”
“A long-jawed orb weaver, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Radtastic!”
I cringed. “Not radtastic,” I protested. “Don’t creep me out.”
“But spiders are cool!”
“I mean it!” I hit him on the arm. Hard.
“Ouch! OK! Back off, short stuff. That hurt!”
All of a sudden the avatar cried out in a ridiculously loud stage voice, “Qianfu! O Brother! I’ve come to take you home.” We twisted around. The Grandfather was hovering in midair, its arms extended to either side of its head, brandishing its globe-topped cane.
I gave a strangled little scream. “What are you doing? Don’t call him!”
Brian seized my arm to steady me. “Hey, Randi, that’s kind of why we’re here.”
That was when I first sensed it. Something had changed. Just what it was, I couldn’t put my finger on. Maybe it was the atmosphere inside the store, not just the old, bottled-up tomb air, but air turbo-charged in some different and ominous way. It was as though anguish incarnate were seeping into the sanatorium and beginning to manifest itself, to thicken into a presence. A memory of how the air had been just after my father was struck by lightning – bristling and electric and smelling of sulfur – came rushing back. It smelled like a lightning strike had just taken place not three feet from us.
Then my vision dimmed and blurred, the way it does when you’re about to pass out – like a gray veil is being dropped over your eyes. I got that sinking f
eeling of, oh boy, I’m going down. Only I didn’t, because all at once there was this crazy loud ringing in my ears, like some humongous bell clang-clanging right beside me – I can’t even begin to describe how loud it was. I clapped my hands over my ears and looked up at Brian. He had a finger stuck in either ear and was staring toward the back of the store. I followed the direction of his gaze to the apparent source of the earsplitting roar: there, on a riser about halfway up the stairs, whirled some kind of mini-tornado, about two feet tall.
“What the heck is that?” I shouted at Brian.
“Looks like a dust devil,” he shouted back.
The avatar cried out to the whirlwind, “Qianfu? Oh, my brother, has it come to this?”
As if in response, the roar from the funnel cloud lessened and the whirlwind’s rate of spin slowed, allowing us flickering glimpses of a faintly human shape with a huge belly and a tiny mouth and throat. It was like flipping really fast through one of those early flip books that paved the way to animation – now funnel cloud, now hideous ghost, now cloud, now ghost. It was gut-wrenching – terrifying and piteous in equal measure.
The avatar cried out, in a voice ragged with emotion, “I have conquered death to save you! Tell me where your bones lie and I will bring them to a place with good chi.” (A little over the top, I know, but that’s how avatars speak.)
There was a momentary silence. Then the whirlwind began to pick up speed. It spun more and more rapidly, sucking up dust and cobwebs from the room. As it took on matter, it grew taller, wider, darker. Something like smoke poured out of it, filling the room, singeing our lungs and making it difficult to breathe. I clung to Brian, numb with terror. “What’s it doing?” I wailed.
The avatar turned to us. “It’s as I feared,” it said. “What was human in him has been utterly consumed. All that is left is wrath and a desire for revenge. We cannot reason with him. We must master him instead. Give me the lo p’an.”
Unable to take my eyes off the ghost, I fumbled for the knapsack slung over my shoulder.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Randi.” Brian reached into my knapsack and retrieved the box. He extracted the lo p’an and lobbed it in the avatar’s direction. As we watched, the compass transitioned into a virtual object, describing a fiery arc like a comet. The Grandfather caught it neatly and, turning to the ghost, began speaking loudly in Chinese.
“What’s he saying?” I begged.
“How should I know?”
Suddenly the funnel cloud, now fully ten feet tall, swung down the stairs and swept across the floor toward us, stopping just short of the avatar, whose outstretched arms appeared to act as some kind of barrier. I shrieked and staggered backward, pulling Brian after me. Once again the whirlwind slowed, until we could make out flickers of the huge-bellied, small-throated ghost, its face elongated in an expression of terrible pain. A hideous noise unraveled from the interior of the funnel, like a scream being ripped into rags. I shrieked again, clapped my hands over my ears, and was just dropping to my knees when Brian caught me by the waist of my jeans, hauled me to my feet, and pushed me toward the door of the shop.
“Brian!” He whirled around. The Grandfather tossed him the lo p’an. It tumbled, luminescent, through the air. As Brian reached up with both hands and caught it the way you would catch a baseball, the avatar disappeared in a cascade of pixels.
I pulled open the door. “Come on!” I grabbed Brian by his wrist and together we stumbled outside. Brian slammed the door shut after us, locked it, and leaned back against it, as if to contain the monster, while I stood on the sidewalk, doubled over and gasping for air. I caught sight of the avatar on the screen of my Zypad. Then the connection timed out and the screen went black.
For the next two hours Brian sat on the other bed in my room back at the Prairie Rose, tabbing maniacally through the gazillion channels available to hotel guests on WebTV, lingering only long enough on each one to give me a brief commentary: “The Oxfam Channel. Look. Loads of starving people. Aubrey would love this.” Or “How can there be an entire portal completely devoted to corgis?” Ordinarily I would have banished him to his room the moment he powered on the TV, because it’s never a good idea to give anyone with ADHD a remote. However, I had just seen a ghost: company of whatever sort – provided it was human and alive – struck me as a positive.
As for what I was doing during that same period, I’d have to say squat. Oh, I made a half-hearted show of scanning the reams of geo-coded data I had downloaded to my Zypad before leaving Calgary – land titles and geospatial data, aerial photographs and topographical data, satellite images and the national road dataset … but basically I was just doing my deer-in-the-headlights impersonation. Hello? If your first paranormal experience doesn’t throw a wrench in your day, I don’t know what will. For the life of me, I couldn’t stop picturing Qianfu’s huge belly and his tiny mouth; his ragged scream lingered in my aching head, unfurling like a distant siren.
And it wasn’t just that the ghost had scared the bejesus out of me, which it had. It had left something in its wake, its gift to me, its legacy – a dreadful feeling of creeping unease that dragged at me like an undertow. It was as though the ghost had not frightened me so much as flattened me, drained me, sucked out of me all of what was never more than a meager store of hope. I despaired. If what we had just experienced was real, in any sense of that word, I no longer knew what “real” was. How much more exists and is real and matters that we don’t see or know? A whole bunch of stuff, if the past few days were any indication. If that was the case, how could we proceed, blinkered as we were – blindfolded? We couldn’t. This, what we were attempting to do – finding an unmarked hole dug over a century before in some unknown spot – was futile, a case of too little, too late. A lost cause. We’d never succeed. How could we? And if we couldn’t, why continue with this … this charade? We might as well pack up, go home, and prepare to meet our various unpleasant ends.
This was what was going through my head when suddenly Brian pulled off his headphones and turned to me. “Enough!” he announced. “I can’t sit here a minute longer with my mind in idle. I’ve got to do something.”
I blinked. “What do you mean, ‘do something’?”
“ ‘Something,’ ” he repeated. “Like you. You’re doing something.”
I shook my head. “Nope. Not really.”
He sprang to his feet and began pacing back and forth.
“Whoa, dude, slow down,” I pleaded. “You’re being way too intense.”
He stopped. “I’m restless. Don’t you ever get restless? I gotta get out of here … get some fresh air!” He turned and headed for the door.
“Where are you going?” I cried.
“Out.”
“Out where?” I began to panic. The last thing I wanted was to be alone.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Shopping. I’m going shopping.”
“For what?”
“Things we need,” he replied. “A shovel. A bag of some sort. A body bag.”
“Where are you going to find a body bag?” I demanded. “At the Bay? At Canadian Tire?”
“I don’t know. Someone has to sell them.”
“Yeah, but I bet they ask a whole lot of questions first.”
“A suit bag, then.”
“Won’t a suit bag be too short?”
“Dead people shrink. And it’s just bones.”
I scrambled to my feet and took hold of his arm. “Don’t leave me, Brian.”
“What? Are you scared?”
“Of course I’m scared. Aren’t you?”
“More … I don’t know … perturbed. C’mon, Randi, give me some space. Nothing’s going to get you while I’m gone.” Taking me by both shoulders, he pushed me back down on the bed. “Just … research something, OK? I need to get my head around this thing. I won’t be long, I promise.” He released my shoulders, snatched the Helio’s keys from the dresser, and left, banging the door behind him.
I started
up, intending to follow him, then thought better of it. Sitting around doing nothing would drive me crazy. I could see his point. I glanced at the window. It was still daylight after all, and what I knew about ghosts – not much – suggested that they weren’t free-range. They had haunts, and clearly the Azure Dragon Tea and Herb Sanatorium was Qianfu’s. Which meant I was probably safe at the Prairie Rose. Probably.
I steeled myself and turned back to my Zypad, scanning the long list of downloads. What did The Grandfather think I’d find? Or did he regard technology as somehow magic, and data as a kind of treasure trove? Of course, data is a treasure trove if what you’re looking for was ever collected in the first place. The burial of Qianfu’s bones had clearly occurred off the record. So why did The Grandfather believe there might be a record of it? Or was he just hoping against hope? I shook my head. This was a wild goose chase I wasn’t up to. I decided to download all the archives of the Moose Jaw Reviewer and the Times-Herald from the time of the Death House fire to when Qianfu’s body went missing. Maybe I’d find something resembling a clue in those newspaper accounts. It was worth a shot.
No sooner had I initiated the Reviewer download than I heard an eerie howl unwinding from the direction of the bathroom. It sounded hollow, like the wail of something not alive, plaintive and menacing at the same time. A second later I was on my feet, ready to let loose a bloodcurdling scream, when I remembered the desk clerk’s warning: that the wind sometimes made the plumbing howl. How had he put it? Like a ghost in a bottle. I clapped my hand over my mouth and stood there waiting for my heart to stop pounding. Don’t be such a sissy, I told myself. It’s just the wind. I crossed to the bathroom, peered inside, then shut the door firmly before returning to the bed and my download. “It’s just the wind, it’s just the wind,” I repeated out loud, as I watched the download indicator bar slowly fill up.
It was eight-thirty when Brian returned, a shovel in one hand and a suit bag in the other. He looked more his old self, relaxed and goofy rather than all conflicted. “Look at this,” he said proudly, holding the bag out for my inspection. “Pierre Cardin. Only the best for old Uncle … Qianfu. Because we know how finicky he is.” He stepped back and scrutinized me. “Hey! You don’t look utterly miserable. Don’t tell me you’ve found something?”
The Geomancer's Compass Page 11