The Geomancer's Compass

by Melissa Hardy

  “That’s a neat trick,” said Brian.

  “I’ll teach you how to do it one day,” the avatar replied. “If you survive this. The lo p’an, Miranda! Miranda!”

  “Just a sec. I know it was here somewhere …” I rooted in my knapsack.

  “Give it here!” Snatching the knapsack from me, Brian retrieved the cherrywood box from its side pocket, opened it, removed the lo p’an, and lobbed it to the avatar. The compass tumbled end over end through the air as it described the now familiar arc that began in our world and ended in the avatar’s. It paused at the arc’s midpoint for a mere second, suspended, before executing a spin so fast that all we saw was a blur. Then, with a wet-sounding pop, it penetrated the membrane that stretched between our two realities, actual and virtual. The avatar caught it with both hands and turned to face the downed porta-potty.

  “Get out of here,” it ordered. “Both of you. Dig him up. Do it as quickly as you can.”

  Something turned over in my brain, clicking into place like a gear shifting, then locking. I grabbed the suit bag. “Someone’s bound to have heard that alarm,” I told Brian. “We’ve got to hurry.”

  “Right!” He turned abruptly and started across the tee, with me on his heels. As we crouched to step through the ragged opening he had cut in the wall of the berry bush, I had to suppress an urge to look back over my shoulder. Don’t, I told myself grimly. That way madness lies. There’s only one way now, and that’s forward.

  The instant I stepped through the breach in the bushes and into the clearing, my Zypad went off with a shriek.

  “What’s the matter?” Brian hissed. “Why’s it doing that?”

  “It’s detecting that bloody laser beam you broke,” I snapped. That kind of frantic beep-beep-beep is annoying when you’re chill; when you’re not chill, it’s enough to send you through the roof. “It picks up invisible info: sensor data, radiation levels, lines of force …”

  “Never mind that! Can’t you disarm it?”

  “I’m doing that, Brian! Just give me a sec. We don’t want to trip that laser beam again.” I consulted the Zypad, made some adjustments, and zoomed in. “OK,” I said, “according to this, the beam is about two feet into the enclosure and around three feet high. I see just the one beam and it looks to be static, not oscillating, so we should be OK to crawl under it.” Crushing the suit bag to my chest, I dropped to my hands and knees and crawled under the beam. Brian followed suit. Three feet inside the perimeter I consulted the Zypad again. “All clear.”

  I stood and glanced around. The space within the bushes was larger than it had looked from outside, certainly larger than I had expected, maybe fifteen feet by fifteen. Its center was marked by a slab of granite, rough on one side, polished on the other, to which a bronze plaque had been affixed. I crossed over to it and crouched down. “ ‘Here lie the remains of an unknown First Nations man believed to have been an ancestor of the Stoney Sioux of this region,’ ” I read. I stood and glanced around me. “But where is ‘here’? We don’t have time to dig up this entire space. This is a job for IAF.”

  “IAF?”

  “Infrastructural anatomy function – a walk-on-map function. It lets me see underground. I’m going down.” I switched on the function and gazed down at the ground through the quivering yellow grid that the application had superimposed over my field of vision. “Elijah said it was a shallow grave, didn’t he?”

  “Two feet.”

  “I’m going to set the maximum at three feet, then. We can go deeper if we need to.” I adjusted the controls and began to slowly walk the grid, keeping my eyes fixed on the ground as the function drilled down one foot, then two, until suddenly a glowing lime-green 3-D shape reminiscent of a mummy appeared on the screen.

  It was the symbol used by WorldBoard to designate a burial.

  I stopped in my tracks and pointed wordlessly at the ground.

  There it was. There he was, what was left of him. Qianfu, The Grandfather’s twin brother. What we had come here for, what had eluded us all this time. And by “us” I meant not just Brian and me, but all of those who had borne the name Liu over many years. Qianfu was unlucky in life, unlucky in love, and the hapless victim of a hate crime whose repercussions had extended far beyond his murder and down through the generations until finally, finally, what had been for so long lost was found. I turned to look at Brian, my eyes wide, and held out my arm so that he could see the Zypad’s screen.

  “Wow,” he said, and we both stared at the ground, speechless, for the moment at least.

  I roused myself to action. After all, how much time did we have before somebody responded to that alarm? It couldn’t be long now. “Follow this line,” I told Brian. Using the toe of my Keds, I traced the outline of the grave as it appeared on my grid. Brian followed close behind me, deepening the outline with the shovel’s blade. The surface area of the grave was quite small, maybe three feet by three feet – smaller than a typical grave, presumably because it contained loose bones rather than a complete skeleton. Government policy dictated that First Nations burial sites be left undisturbed; that had worked to our advantage. Had the bones been removed from the site, they would have probably been placed in some kind of ossuary and reburied in a standard seven-foot-deep grave, not Rawlins’s shallow two-foot one. A deeper grave would have required a much greater effort, and far more time to dig up. We were lucky – if catching a break after generations of being cursed could be considered lucky.

  While Brian cut the sod above the grave, I retrieved the suit bag, laid it on the ground, and unzipped it. Then I straightened up and, hugging myself tightly and chewing on my lower lip, looked on as Brian methodically sliced the sod into squares with the shovel’s blade end. Too methodically, for my taste. Who cared how neat a job he did? “What are you doing?” I demanded. “Why aren’t you digging?”

  “I’m the landscape guy, remember? I know what I’m doing. First you lift the sod. Then you dig.”

  “I don’t like this,” I fretted. “I can’t believe nobody’s going to check out that alarm.” I glanced over my shoulder toward the opening in the bushes. “And it’s way too quiet. What’s going on out there, anyway? With The Grandfather and the ghost? Why don’t we hear anything?”

  “Do you want me to dig or listen?”

  “Dig!”

  And that was when we heard it – a distant combination of growl and bark, coming from the direction of the clubhouse. All the hairs on my neck stood on end, and my stomach lurched.

  “Uh-oh,” said Brian.

  “You told me that there wouldn’t be any dogs!”

  “I told you there probably wouldn’t be any dogs.”

  “You sounded awfully positive!”

  “I’m a positive kind of guy!”

  I wrung my hands. “That doesn’t sound like a nice dog!”

  “No, it really doesn’t. On the bright side, it sounds like there’s only one of them.”

  “Great!”

  I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and gave myself a stern talking-to: OK, Miranda, if it’s a choice between being mauled by a dog now or eaten by a shark later, then … then what? I snorted. Who was I kidding? The only real choice I had was how I was going to handle this challenge, whether I was going to be paralyzed with fear or go down fighting. And I could choose. I couldn’t always choose what happened to me – I often couldn’t, and I certainly hadn’t chosen this whole Qianfu thing – but I sure as heck could choose how I dealt with it. “Oh well, maybe he’ll only maul us a little,” I said to Brian. “You keep digging. I’ll suss the dog thing out.” Making my way to the edge of the clearing, I dropped to my hands and knees, crawled under the laser beam, and crouched in the opening.

  What I saw took my breath away, as surely as though someone had punched me hard in the stomach. I sat back on my heels and stared, jaw slack with amazement.

  The felled porta-potty lay in a pool of some dark, lustrous substance that gleamed like liquid mercury and seemed to have si
milar properties. The ancients called mercury “quicksilver,” meaning “living silver,” but the disgusting pool from the porta-potty, whatever it was, was not silver but poisonous green. A form rose from the pool like a stalagmite from the floor of a cave, glistening and slippery. At first I thought it was composed of the same matter as the pool, but then I realized that there was someone or, more likely, something encased within the green ooze, something that was trying to free itself.

  Could that be Qianfu’s hungry ghost? I could just make out a pitifully tiny mouth, wide open in a soundless scream, and two eyes like burning embers that radiated hatred and despair. Hatred and despair – a toxic combination, an altogether more potent concoction than hatred alone. After all, despair fuels hatred, and despair has nothing more to lose. And what is a more terrifying enemy than one with nothing to lose? Oh, surely it was Qianfu! Who or what else could it be?

  I leaned forward to try to get a better look. That was when I noticed the membrane – a thick, transparent membrane like that of a jellyfish, wrapped tight around the struggling form. It seemed to have a life of its own; it pulsated rhythmically, like a heart. It struck me that it was this and this alone that prevented Qianfu’s ghost from breaking free. Where had it come from?

  I glanced to my left and found my answer: the avatar. The membrane was like some kind of magical net that it had cast over the ghost, a force field of some sort, and now they were locked in this wicked cosmic standoff. The avatar stood facing the ghost, supersized. It loomed, arms outstretched, with the glowing green globe in one hand and the lo p’an in the other.

  All of a sudden, I heard a man’s voice and heavy canine panting and, I swear it, slavering. How could I have forgotten? The savage dog, the security guard … reality check! My heart skittered like a stone over water, slammed into something hard, and went into a death spiral. I dropped to my belly like a snake and wriggled backward, far enough into the bushes that I could see and not be seen – unless the security guard were to shine a flashlight in my direction, in which case it would be well and truly game over.

  “Damn kids,” I heard. “Nah, they’ve just overturned the porta-potty. The fourth hole. Yeah. What a mess! One thing I can tell you, Bob, glad it’s not me who has to clean it up! Wouldn’t want to be a maintenance guy tomorrow morning!”

  What would we be charged with? I lay there on my belly, with brambles poking in my face, thinking hard. Trespassing, probably. Vandalism, obviously. But trespassing and vandalism weren’t so bad. We were teenagers, after all, and that is what teenagers do – go places they aren’t supposed to and break a bunch of stuff. Normal teenagers, that is, unlike us, two Asian kids from out of province whose elders, living and dead, have sent them on a mission to lift the family curse by digging up a supposedly First Nations burial site and hauling the ancient bones back to B.C. This was not normal; it was weird. Maybe telling the truth wasn’t so smart. How serious a crime was desecrating a grave, anyway? Would we get off easy, with community service, or would we have to go to some kind of jail? That we would get caught I didn’t doubt. It was only a question of time. I mean, what kind of nimrod security guard would not notice a person-sized hole cut in the bushes?

  At that very moment, the guard was telling good old Bob, “What I can’t figure out is how they broke that beam.”

  OK, I thought, here it comes.

  “These bushes look pretty impenetrable …”

  Brace yourself, Miranda. Any second now…

  There was a silence, then “Pooky!” The guard sounded surprised.

  Pooky? Who was Pooky?

  “What is it, girl? What’s the matter?”

  Of course! It was the dog he was talking to. Pooky the killing machine. Pooky, whose reply was a high-pitched yelp followed by a whimper – much to my surprise and relief.

  I crept forward a little and peered out. There was the security guard, standing with his back to the mess, a sleek, pointy-eared Doberman cowering at his side. The guard was bulky and bald and had a headset hooked over one ear; he was training a big industrial flashlight on the felled porta-potty. For a second I couldn’t believe my eyes. He was looking straight at, and apparently straight through, The Grandfather and Qianfu’s hungry ghost. How could he not see them? They were so … right in front of him! Then I realized that I could only see them – The Grandfather, at any rate – because of the I-spex. How I would experience the ghost in a non-virtual state, I had no way of knowing. None of this explained why Pooky could see them. Because it was pretty clear from her posture and her manner that she did see them, or at least sensed them.

  “Hey, Pookster,” the guard said. Suddenly he appeared uncertain, even uneasy. “What’s with you, anyway?” Once again the dog yelped and slunk behind him, tail between her legs, shivering. “Beats the heck out of me, Bob.” He sounded worried now. “She’s scared of something, all right. Real scared.” He glanced around, shining his flashlight here and there, but in front of him, around the porta-potty, not back in our direction. “Tell you the truth, Bobby, this is making me kind of nervous. If the dog is freaked out … you know, they don’t pay me enough that it’s worth …” He let out an anxious “whew,” and swallowed hard. “Well, whoever done this is probably long gone. I’ll file the report with maintenance. They can check on it in the morning.” Then, to Pooky, “OK, OK, we’re going. Calm down, would you?”

  I managed to sneak a peek around the edge of the hole cut in the brambles just long enough to get a look at Pooky’s face as she dragged the guard off in the direction of the clubhouse, straining at her leash. I’ve never in my life seen a dog so terrified.

  Somebody touched my shoulder lightly. It was Brian. “What happened?” he whispered.

  “They’re gone,” I whispered back. “The dog could see them – The Grandfather and the ghost. The guy couldn’t, but the dog definitely could. She was scared, and that scared him. They won’t come back. We’re in the clear.”

  Brian whistled softly. “Crazy! Maybe it’s like those animals that make it to higher ground when a tsunami strikes. Somehow they just know it’s coming. They feel it in their bones. Speaking of which … guess who I’ve found?”

  A moment later, I was kneeling beside the grave and peering into the shallow hole at a jumble of soil-stained bones piled up in its approximate center. To one side of the pile lay a grubby-looking skull, to the other a pelvic bone. “We really didn’t need a suit bag, did we?” I said. “A good-sized tote would have done the trick.”

  “Do the honors?” Brian offered.

  I shuddered. “Are you kidding? Eeuw!”

  Brian snorted. “What a squeamer!” Lying on his stomach, he reached into the grave and brought up Qianfu’s skull. The soil had stained it ocher in places, with patches of green that looked suspiciously like mold. He pointed to a jagged break beginning just over the hole where Qianfu’s left eye had been. “Old hockey injury?”

  I held the suit bag open and looked away so I wouldn’t have to see the skull up close. “Duh! He was beaten, Doofus. That’s how he died.”

  “At least he kept all his teeth.” Brian deposited the skull inside the bag. “Although, I gotta say, they could use a good brushing.” Reaching back into the grave, he retrieved the pelvic bone. “Sorry for manhandling your privates, dude,” he apologized to the bones. He glanced in the direction of the tee and the porta-potty. “What the heck is going on out there, anyway?”

  Where to start? “Do you remember that stinky ooze that came out of the porta-potty?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Turned out to be Qianfu’s ghost, or at least some of it was. It’s hard to tell what’s exactly what. It’s all kind of … commingled.”

  “You’re kidding me!” Brian was pulling out bones and placing them randomly in the bag. Fibulas? Tibias?

  “And now … now The Grandfather and the ghost are locked in … I don’t know what they’re locked in. Some kind of slo-mo cosmic smackdown’s the best way I can describe it. Not a whole lot is going on
, but it looks super weird.”

  “Whaddya mean?” Brian surfaced with what had to be a scapula.

  “The Grandfather has the ghost all wrapped in some bizarre transparent gel or force field or something.”

  “Get out of here! Force field? What the heck are these, anyway?”

  “Phalanges,” I identified the bunch of small bones he held out to me. “Fingers.”

  “Wicked! I have a handful of fingers!”

  “Or toes.”

  “A cosmic smackdown …” Brian rose up on his haunches and looked toward the opening cut in the bush. “I’m sorry, cuz, but this I gotta see.”

  I had just reached out to restrain him when these two ginormous forms heaved into sight, above the bushes, silhouetted against the night sky. Both The Grandfather and the ghost had shot up to twice their already supersized height, so they were now as tall as a two-story building and towering over us. Needless to say, it was pretty startling. I gave a strangled little scream and toppled backward onto my bum, and Brian froze.

  The ghost now appeared to be entirely confined within the jelly-like membrane, which had thickened and grown more opaque than when I had last seen it. This had the effect of further squashing the ghost, rendering its few features indistinct – its glittering red eyes were now pinkish smudges, and its gaping mouth a gray blur.

  “How are you two doing, anyway?” The Grandfather asked, without looking away from the ghost.

  “Uh, fine!” I managed.

  “Almost finished!” croaked Brian.

  “Well, make it snappy. This isn’t exactly easy.”

  “Right!” Brian fell back onto his knees and began to pull bones out of the grave with both hands, fast, like a dog digging a hole. I saw a femur fly past, and a sternum attached to a rib cage, and what might have been a clavicle.