The House of Life 3

by Vann Chow

  “Did she eat humans alive?” The cabin boy exclaimed. He was not afraid but intrigued instead.

  “Humans?!” Elise leaned closer over the window pane. “Do snake demons eat humans?!”

  “Well, demons and human beings have never really coexisted peacefully in history,” Jade said, shaking her head.

  Elise hadn’t considered the possibility before that her guest would become a menace to everyone. Was it wrong to help a fragile, pregnant woman?

  Presently the snake’s loosened its grip over the ship and went completely limp. A cloud of blood rose from where its belly was sliced open from within, eliciting gasps of horrors from its on-lookers. Emerging from the gut of the snake were two figures entangled in a fight, but they stopped when they were spewed out into the buoyant, muddy water that made it hard for them to continue fighting. The two men were none other than Admiral Henry and Ian Bennett.

  Besides them, the injured white snake started to shrink back to its original size, and into its human-shape form, the form of Miss Bai. Ian saw it and peddled himself towards the woman who had saved his life. He wondered why has she also saved the vicious Admiral Henry who had now abandoned his rapier as he no longer has sufficient strength to wield it under water and decided to choke Ian with his bare hands from the back instead.

  A glowing, round object rose from the belly of the gutted snake. Despite her newness to the realm of supernatural, Elise knew what it was. It could only have been one thing, an egg. It was Miss Bai’s baby!

  A sudden rush of current swept it out of sight. Elise couldn’t just watch any more. She had to do something.

  “All of you jump inside the bracelet!” She raised it above her head and gave the order to Jade, who gathered everyone in the cabin in a tight circle around Elise with their hands held together. With a chant, a spark ignited from Jade’s body and spread from one end of the circle to another, forming a ring of fire. Elise looked on in surprise as her companions were burnt into ashes.

  “What happened to them?!” Elise asked Madam Siu, who looked on from the corner of the room in disinterest.

  “That’s what you asked for — they can’t take their paper bodies inside the jade palace, only spirits could move around like that. I mean, you should know. It’s what the moderners called physics.”

  Before Elise could understand the meta-physical repercussion of her order, three intertwining trails of smokes tailing a single spark rose out of the dark ashes on the ground and blended together in mid-air. It fleeted around her raised arm and eventually disappeared when it got in contact with her bracelet, adding new trace of colorful, flowy stripes to its surface.

  “Do you want to come or do you want to stay here?” Elise asked Madam Siu, who pursed her lips and transformed into a glowing speck without saying a word. She, too, became nothing more than a shade of green on the jewelry.

  Without further ado, Elise flung the door open. A wall of river water, together with the tiny sea creatures that inhibited in the Yangtze crashed onto her, but she was too desperate to care. She had to save Miss Bai’s baby.

  Still catching his breath by the railings on deck, Michael caught sight of Elise rushing up from below deck and attempting to climb over it.

  “Stop her! Stop her at once!” Michael pointed at Elise with his trembling finger and a hoarse voice. He had just lugged over six hundred kilogram of silver ingots from the wreckage of the Imperieuse under water. It was no small feat, and anyone would find their arms and legs trembling from fatique, too, if they had done the same.

  The White Commissioner was the first one to get to her. They struggled for a while by the railing until the White Commissioner saw with the corner of this eyes the shadow of Admiral Henry under water. The vision said something to him and he dove in at once, letting go of Elise. The girl took the opportunity and jumped into the water as well. She swam in the direction of where the glowing egg had been swept off.

  “No!” Michael rose from where he was and rushed over to where the White Commissioner and Elise had dived in. “What was she doing?!” He pronounced his confusion to no one in particular, for the crews were not sharp and he hadn’t expected any answer from them. He puffed and sighed, then plunged into the dark, murky water after the stubborn girl whom he had set his mind on marrying.

  Egg

  The shell of the egg was light green, and it sat, glowing with a vague silhouette of the life inside, on a pedestal wrapped in white chiffon that was originally brought onboard as part of Elise’s wedding dress.

  Two pairs of celestial guards kept watch of the egg and the fifteen crates of Qing silver that were kept in the cellar prisons of the Big Eye Fish on rotation.

  Most of the prisoners were now released and allowed to move around the ship on account of the unusual circumstances, and they crowded the corridor to the water-proof cabin under deck, trying to take a peek at the inside.

  The furniture of the cabin had been cleared out to make room for two stretchers for the injured persons White Commissioner carried back onboard from under water.

  On the left laid Ian, the British boy, who seemed to be frozen in an awkward position, his hands grabbing something around his neck and his feet fanned out as if they were paddling in mid-swim. A nasty bruise mark could be seen around his neck underneath his hands. The boy, the prisoners gossiped among themselves, had been lucky to survive being choked to death by the fiendish Admiral Henry, but he must have done so by reminding himself that he was not physically there, that Admiral Henry could do no harm to him despite the tight grip around his neck, and that had knowledge crystalized his body in this realm. The gossipers exchanged recipes of what should be done about a soul in such a state.

  Elise mentally blocked out the noise from the other side of the cabin door. Her full attention was placed on the sewing needle in the seamstress’ hand that went up and down in an attempt to sew the slit belly of Miss Bai shut. There were a lot of blood, in dark green, on the floor, but luckily they turned into dried dust and got incorporated into the wood boards of the floor as soon as the two met, sparing Elise from the sight of a horrifying, slippery mess.

  “I’m done!” The seamstress declared and let out of a sigh of relief as she wiped the beads of sweats from her forehead. The laundress wrung a wet towel and used it to gently wiped off the remainder of the blood over the body of the snake.

  “Here, slap a layer of these over her wound,” the herb grinder handed the laundress with the mortar filled with a black, repugnant paste in it.

  “What’s that?” Elise asked, wrinkling her nose.

  “Opium paste,” the herb grinder replied with a straight face. “Best anesthetics you can find in nature.”

  “Where’d you get it?” Elise asked, surprised to hear the word opium.

  “We didn’t have any strong anesthetics on board. The master found these in what’s left of the English ship’s cargo,” she pointed at the two big black balls sitting on the floor. One of the had a chunk chiseled off of it. “Most English ships coming to China in the eighteen and nineteen hundreds had crateloads of them,” the herb grinder explained nonchalantly, as if opium was the most ordinary, daily thing, like butter.

  “But…” Elise was about to ask more, when Jade lit up with a spark from her fingers a lump of dark green paste the size of a pebble. It started to burn, and the smokes from it quickly filled the interior of small cabin. Elise sneezed as the distinctive smell of it reached her nose.

  “Hashish, resin of the cannabis plants native to India.”

  “What’s this now? Are we running a drug lab in here?!” Elise frowned at the herbalist.

  “The British boy needs it. He needed to relax, otherwise he would be stuck in dreamland forever.”

  “It’s worse than it sounds,” Jade assured Elise.

  “That’s for sure. We don’t have a lot of burial ground for any more crystalized soul in the small cemetery at the back of the Chamber of Life and Nutrition. You know how scarce land is in Hong Kong. We might
just have to crush him up and let his salts be scattered in the wind at sea if he doesn’t come back alive any time soon…”

  “No, don’t scatter him to the wind! Revive him please! Let him smoke and get him to come back to life, or death.” Elise went over to Ian’s side and touched the back of his hardened hand. She hardly knew the boy, but she wouldn’t wish a kind-hearted soul like him dead. Moreover, it was her carelessness that dragged him into all these by accident. She felt responsible for his current plight.

  Outside the cabin, the curious ghosts were sucking in deep breaths of opiate smokes that seeped out from underneath its doors and feeling a little happier than they ever did.

  “What’d happened to him?!” Chad burst through the doors without knocking and crouched next to the body of his best friend.

  “He’s suffering from Post-Traumatic Dream Disorder, PTDD,” explained the herbalist, which Elise had found out was sort of a doctor in a way around here.

  “Meaning?”

  “He tried too hard to wake up from his dream unsuccessfully. It’s dangerous to do it without proper guidance. But don’t worry, this should bring him back,” the herbalist referred to the smoke.

  “This smells like urine!” Chad turned toward the origin of familiar smells and saw Jade fanning the burning hashish paste from a bowl towards Ian. “Is that…”

  “Yes, it is,” Elise replied him with a knowing frown. “Do you need some medical attention yourself?” Elise gave him a onceover. The man himself was covered in black blood and there was a huge gaping wound in his chest. She was surprised that Chad was the one bouncing around without a care in the world while Ian was lying in bed unable to move.

  “Nah, this is nothing,” he said. “It doesn’t hurt.”

  “Some people have higher tolerance for the unfamiliar,” the herbalist explained to Elise. “Knowing how to take things in stride is an important quality whether you’re alive or dead.”

  “You mean it’s a good thing he’s an idiot?” Elise whispered back with a smirk and received a small nod.

  Seeing that the sick and the injured were being taken care of, Elise finally huffed a sigh of relief and felt the tension on her shoulders eased a little. She sat on the coffer on the corner and her mind gave way to pessimistic thoughts.

  The world of the dead was dangerous, let alone disturbing. — Her appearance, together with her belongings, the diary of her great-grandmother to be precise, into this realm had caused an unstoppable chain reaction. First she indirectly caused a serious misconduct by Celestial Court official, then it was the attack of the Chamber by Wuzha, followed by the visit to the Ghost City to read her ancestor’s history that ended up in a maritime battle. Now they were going to return to Hong Kong with no new information but fifteen crates of long-lost battle spoils and an egg of a snake-demon with an entire Hell army after them. And what would happen to her exactly?

  Every moment here seemed a compound of every nightmare. To think that just a few days ago she was a mere ‘human’, a student who thought that the worst thing that could happen to her was being late to her first day at the company she was interning. It seemed so trivial now, her earthly concern.

  “Miss, you don’t look well,” Jade made the observation.

  Elise nodded, admitting defeat.

  “We all felt this way on our first days. Anxious, scared, powerless,” the typically caustic voice of Madam Siu had turned almost sympathetic, and it rang out from the bracelet around her wrist, causing tiny vibrations. Elise took a look at the jade and saw behind a veil of white smoke the silhouette of a woman, Madam Siu, no doubt, on the watch tower of the Jade palace within. “Everything in this realm is designed to be frightful.”

  “Frightful?” Elise repeated the word.

  “Yes, the souls of the dead are reaped and brought to this realm of in-between. They have seven days to experience all its glory and horrors alike, then ninety-nine point nine percent of them realized at the end of the seven days that, really, this is not for them, that they belong to the world of the living, and willingly confess all their sins and begged for forgiveness so that they would be given the chance to cross the Nether Bridge, drink the Soup of Forgetting from Lady Meng, and enter into the wheel of reincarnation to their next life, whatever it maybe. It’s scare tactics that works almost every time.”

  “But it didn’t work on you,” Elise commented, recalling the fact that Madam Siu was to return to hell to her punishment after the seven-day long ‘reflective break’.

  “Ha,” the lady made a cold laugh. “I’m beyond hope.”

  “Is it so hard to admit that you were wrong?” Elise asked.

  “Right and wrong is a matter of perspective.”

  “Now you’re just trying to rationalize a crime.”

  “You had no idea what happened that night...”

  “Madam,” Jade chimed in sympathetically. “You were provoked gravely that night. You only have to tell everyone what really happened to be freed…”

  “Hush, Jade,” the woman ordered her to stop. “Not a word more. The past is the past. I only want what was best for your Master. Hong Kong needs him.”

  Elise found herself frowning. The way Madam spoke revealed that she loved her husband more than Elise had originally thought. Michael said that Madam Siu set fire to their mansion to kill them all, likely out of rage, but he didn’t explain why. What really happened that night? What provoked her to kill a man she clearly cared a lot about and willingly bringing herself down along with him? Her actions sounded almost sounded martyr-like. Elise was so intrigued by this new bits of information she almost forgot about her own problems.

  “Where did you guys hide the twin?” A second visitor spilled into the cramped cabin through the unlocked doors. It was the Psychic. His face was red and he was erratic.

  “Hide?! Why would we want to hide them?” Jade strode over to the doors in an attempt to push him back out. “There are too many souls in here. The sick needs to rest.”

  “No, tell me, where’d you guys hide the twins?” He asked once more, wedging himself between the doors. “I saw them coming towards our way in my vision, but I have searched up and down the Big Eye Fish just now and I couldn’t find them!”

  “Hmm…given how ‘short-sighted’ you are, indeed they should have returned long ago,” Chad said. “I mean even I did, and I wasn’t the one on horseback.”

  “How did you get back on board?”

  “How else? The Black Commissioner carried me, of course!”

  “This is bad… I see something big in my vision. It’s approaching us. It has the twins,” the Psychic mumbled disconcertedly, bracing his head.

  Panic rose in him. He sprinted off to the deck to find the young master.

  Captured

  “Are you saying that something happened to them on the way back?” Michael asked. “What do you see? And can you see where they are now?”

  The Psychic braced his head in frustration. “I can’t seem to see anything further. It’s as if my vision has been blocked by a giant…” He was going back to the fragments of the futures he saw in earlier. “The last sensible vision that had them on it was the one where they were riding back towards the Big Eye Fish, on two flying horses, one big, one small.”

  “The eagle and a pigeon,” Black Commissioner explained. “I magiced them up.”

  “Do you think they have eloped?!” The quartermaster chimed in. “They certainly have the means…”

  The Black Commissioner’s face turned a shade darker for what the quartermaster was suggesting that could be interpreted as bad judgement on his part. Of the three men he took with him to the Fishing Castle, Chad was the one most likely to elope, not the Mongolian twin. Not them. They were too loyal to do such a thing, he thought. There must be more to their disappearance.

  “Let me fly back to the Fishing Castle and search for them.”

  “Okay, be careful,” the young master said. But just as he finished his sentence, the Big Eye Fish w
as lifted, seemingly, by a mysterious force out of water. It torn out of the surface of the River Yangtze in such speed it threw everyone off balance. Michael searched for an answer on the helmsman’s face, found nothing, then he tried the captain, as he fumbled for something to steady himself. He realized that neither of them had a clue why this was happening.

  Without a word from him, Black Commissioner darted out of the bridge and flew atop the Big Eye Fish to get a good look at what was happening. A dark shadow quickly enveloped him and the Big Eye Fish. He looked up to find the most unbelievable sight in front of him and gasped.

  “The Gautama Buddha!” Michael had torn out of the bridge and saw it as well. He knelt on the deck and bowed his head in deference. Everyone else followed the example of their master.

  “What’s going on?” Elise had stormed out of the cabin. She sprinted up the staircases as soon as her head emerged above the deck and saw some of the crew kneeling and others even prostrating, on deck. Then she found herself standing directly in front of a giant pair of eyes that belonged to a stern face made entirely out of red clay.

  “Who…are you?” Elise stumbled backwards as she tried to take in the full visage of the Buddha.

  “Shh!” Michael hushed her and waved her over. The Buddha smiled at the girl and said, “I’m Siddhārtha Gautama, and I came from the mountain Le.” As his lips moved, chunks of century-old red clay fell from his face and rolled into the sea. He had not spoken in ages and his face felt a little stiff.

  “He’s the giant Buddha statue in the Mountain Le! Kneel and show your respect!” Black Commissioner flown over and landed next to Elise. He tried to pull her down but Elise resisted.

  “I’m not kneeling for him! He’s not a God!” Elise declared and flung her arms, freeing herself from Black Commissioner’s grip. “So this is what the Psychic was referring to,” she said to herself. “Did you take our men? Please return them immediately!” Her hands on her waist, she demanded.