The House of Life 3

by Vann Chow

  She now raked her brain for the little she had read in the book. If only she had paid attention when Michael was showing it to her. She drew a complete blank.

  “What are you doing?” Ian caught her acting even weirder than Chad.

  “Old man, is there a temple around here?” She asked.

  “Well, yes, of course!” He answered without hesitation. “Our bus pass by it every day. There’s a Prince Hau Temple just around the corner to the right!”

  “Why are you looking for a temple?”

  “The sutra,” Elise replied. “The sutra has a bunch of mudra hand gestures…they must do something. I just can’t remember any of it.”

  “What sutra?” Ian asked, baffled.

  “I’ll tell you later. How far is the temple?” Chad asked the conductor.

  “Not two hundred meters. You turn here and you’ll see it!” The old man said confidently. “Are you asking the spirit of Prince Hau for help? That’s not a bad idea, actually! He was the protector of the heir to the Song’s throne when they had to escape from the Mongolian army in the 12th century. If he could protect the young heir, his power would be enough to protect us!”

  “12th century, would his power be as potent as it used to be? It’s already the 21st century…”

  “It will be fine. We need to go there,” Elise looked Ian in the eyes and said. “You stay here. Chad and I will go.”

  Confused, Ian blinked uncontrollably. He felt abandoned. “Why him? Why not me?!”

  Chad wasn’t sure he was up for scratch himself. The same question surfaced to the surprised look on his face. “You’re not sacrificing me to keep him alive, are you?” He was now upset.

  “No!” Elise grabbed Chad’s shirt and left it up. There was a giant slit in the middle of his chest. It was mending, but not completely. One could see the side of his beating heart. “Look at him! He survived being pierced through the heart with a spear with no visible pain or discomfort.”

  Chad pulled down his shirt in embarrassment. Despite all his talks, he was unaccustomed to a woman touching and staring at his chest in public.

  Ian opened his mouth and expressed his surprise. “Man, what happened to you?! Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “It’s nothing.” Chad frowned. “You were injured and all…I didn’t want to bother you with this.”

  “Interesting,” the old man commented. “Very interesting.” He sounded almost impressed.

  “Look, he’s immune to injuries inflicted on him in this realm, or at least he had been so far. There’s a greater chance that he could protect me than you.” After Elise finished that sentence, she felt the insensitivity in it herself, but that was the truth. Ian was visibly upset by his comparative disadvantage.

  “Let’s go!” Elise grabbed Chad by the collar and a trail of bullets grazed his scalp. He could do nothing but wrap the girl in his arms and dash for the temple around the corner. He sure hoped the old man’s memory hadn’t failed him.

  The Command Center

  Michael pulled the telescope away. “How much time do we have?”

  “Twenty minutes,” Commander Bao answered. Then he corrected himself as the needle indicating the minute on the old pocket watch clipped to his belt ticked closer to the ominous hour. “Nineteen now, Master.”

  A row of archers had lined the balconies and the roof of the building facing the Walled City they currently occupied, waiting for Michael’s command.

  “Did the spies come back?”

  His brother Ken had a small troop of shapeshifting canines of different breeds and builds, and under his lead, they had been tasked with sneaking into the Walled City through the various unmonitored crevices of the crumbling group of tenements which soldiers of human physique could not get through undetected.

  “One did,” Bao said, waving the dog in. An injured brown hair Cantonese mongrel limped into the dining room of the modern luxury apartment they had borrowed on the thirtieth floor as their temporary command center. Its owner was Bao’s dead sister’s grandson, a successful sales manager of some sort of heavy industry equipment, and he was away on holiday at the moment, oblivious to the matters of the underworld taking place in his very own apartment. By Heaven’s laws, they are permitted here due to the small red shrine perched on top of a tall cabinet with wooden plaques he had dedicated to his deceased grandmother and parents, making it usable for any emergency Celestial Court matters.

  “Young master!” the dog bowed in front of Michael. “Members of our squad have been spotted by the enemy. Master Ken blocked off an attack aimed at me to save me, and that was the sole reason I could present myself here to send you intel from within.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “The last I saw of him, he had bitten an arm off of a Qing soldier that was going after me. The soldier was in an entranced state, and was unperturbed by the fact that his arm had been amputated. He jumped after the master with the remainder of his bloodied arms outstretched like a zombie.”

  The observation made the listening group weary.

  The dog continued, “Young master skipped between the jutting structures of the hideous constructions around and went up higher grounds to conceal himself from his pursuer. But Wuzha has the entire city on lock down. I worry that no one would be willing to take Master Ken in. His situation is very perilous.”

  “Wait a minute. Did you say that his purser was jumping?” Noqai, who was listening intently, repeated the words with apprehensive curiosity.

  “Yes, I dodged another group of Wuzha’s men, and they were all behaving in this strange ways. There was no expression on their face except an unwavering determination to kill. I couldn’t help but wonder if they are not possessed by evil spirit greater than their own.”

  “Their physical bodies must have been tied up by ropes,” Michael made a guess. “It was a common practice to tie dead bodies up for convenience so that they could be packed and transported on carts without complication. Battle deaths of the enemy did not warrant proper burials. They must have been flung into a mass grave by the British soldiers like loins of meat tied up and toasted into coal fire for a roast.”

  “And you’re saying that their mental states have returned to the moment of their deaths and hence their ‘freed’ souls are behaving as if they are trapped in their old physical bodies with ropes tied around their feet?”

  “That’s possible. We have known that in violent hysteria, lingering souls’ hatred for their murderers heightened, and they lost all sensibility.”

  “But what induced such hysteria?” Maide inquired.

  “That is also my question. The British colonists killed them in early 1900s. It had nothing to do with us.”

  “But now they demanded the Book of Life and Death. It is obvious that Wuzha either want information from it, or want to modify information on the Book.”

  “Could he bring himself and his men back to life if he altered their entries?” Skinny Bones who had followed the group here asked.

  “No, what’s been done was done,” Michael explained. “But he could change the outcome for open entries.”

  “Open entries? Who does he know in the modern world enough for him to want the Book of Life and Death so much?”

  “We don’t know. Our historians are not able to tell us much. Wuzha migrated South at a late age. Records at the Hong Kong Celestial Library on him was limited. — But in any case, Wuzha must not have the Book of Life and Death, and he won’t. We must get Master Siu and Ken out of there as soon as possible.” Commander Bao said.

  “Quickly, describe the landscape you saw inside the walls at once. Clear this space!” Michael asked the dog as he waved his men off the carpet. He then muttered a spell at it. It suddenly flapped into life and undulations on it transformed quickly into pillars and then walls and eventually to towers. One could see an approximate shape of the Walled City materialized in front of them. Thirty or so discernable but tightly-squeezed buildings on the outside formed its outer wall, bu
t the inside was still an empty hollow space, as Michael had no notion of what was inside.

  “What’s behind the wall? Where did you get in? And where did you get out?” He asked the canine, who clambered over the carpet and started pawing the approximate route of his entry, where him and his colleagues were ambushed, and where he had run off to.

  “It’s only more towers inside. Layers upon layers, as if following a concentric rectangle pattern. Tall edifices of the buildings enshrouded me. Sunlight barely reach the ground of the narrow passageways in between their walls.”

  The carpet molded itself following the canine’s description to form a bleak sight in front of them. The Walled City was an impossible structure created by centuries of ingenious and desperate human will to find territory for each of its members in a highly limited space.

  “Wow!” The Mongolian brothers marveled. Maide then said, “I have never seen a fortress so compacted before. One could easily be trapped within it with no way of navigating out.”

  “The Walled City has always been difficult to penetrate throughout history. The British government had tried numerous time to capture it and failed,” Commander Bao said, shaking his head. “In any case, we have asked the Celestial British Embassy for help. They are now trying to locate the soul of any man involved in the first successful attack of the Walled City in 1899.”

  “1899!” Michael threw his hand up in despair. “Is there nothing more recent?!”

  “Yes,” Commander Bao sported a look of distress when he answered this question. “In 1941, the Japanese army was able to perforate its defense. But I suppose we didn’t want to ask the invaders for assistance…”

  Michael stared hard into the Commander’s eyes and shook his head. “We mustn’t send any more men in to risk capture,” he eventually said, squinting at the three-dimensional schema of the Walled City in front of him. “We must do this smartly.”

  Then the bargaining chip he had hauled all the way from Chongqing came into his mind. “White, bring a message to Wuzha for me.” He whispered something in White Commissioner’s ear, who nodded in agreement with his master’s plan.

  “The few of you, come with me!” White Commissioner beckoned the twin and Skinny Bones to follow him. The arsonist stared reluctantly at the group and remained where he was with his arms crossed.

  “Suit yourself,” White Commissioner hissed at him.

  “Master, there’s movement near the South Gate!” A watchman reported. “The enemy had opened fire.”

  “What’s in the South Gate?” Michael put the telescope to his eye and scanned the landscape. “Do we have men over there?”

  “Oh no, young master,” the Psychic shouted. He had seen a vision. “Elise and the mortals are in danger!”

  Just before he finished his sentence, Michael had spotted Elise and two dreamers, Chad and Ian in his field of vision. An unidentifiable old man was huddled together with them behind a large stone plaque that marked the Southern exit of the Walled City. The plaque did not look like it would hold much longer.

  “What did you see?” Michael asked the psychic.

  “Elise’s going to dash out from behind it!” He answered.

  “Quick! Fire the cannon!” He ran over to the falconet, a small cannon that had been set up on the apartment’s balcony and aimed it at a spot just before the South gate behind the plaque. The gunner quickly lit the pricker and stepped back. An explosion was heard immediately below them near the South Gate. A cloud of dust and smoke blanketed the area. It was then Michael saw a blurry figure took advantage of the cover the explosion provided to dash out from behind the plaque. It was Elise.

  “Black! Go get her!” He ordered the Black Commissioner.

  The Temple

  “What are we doing here?” Chad asked Elise, panting. They had managed to duck into the Prince Hau’s temple safely. It was entirely coincidental that an explosion broke out as soon as they ran. Perhaps the Gods were watching over them somehow.

  “Buddha, I’m looking for Buddha,” Elise replied, sprinting straight for the alcove in the back of the temple hall.

  “You’re looking for Buddha in Prince Hau’s temple? Are you not searching in the wrong place?”

  “Deities come in and out of favors. All new temples were built on old ones. This temple was only renamed and remodeled for Prince Hau in 1730s. Before that, it must have been a Buddhist temple!”

  As soon as Elise reached the alcove where a magnificently crafted and painted wooden statue of Prince Hau was enshrined on a highly ornamented pedestal, she looped around the large wooden offering table in front of it and started looking around. There was, to Chad’s surprise, indeed a giant wood sculpture covered by a dark red velvet sash behind Prince Hau’s statue on the pedestal. The exposed part at the bottom looked like a lotus throne. He yanked the sash off to find, in addition to a Buddha statue, one, two, three…seven small children standing on the lotus throne precariously, hugging his legs for balance.

  “What are you little people doing here?” He asked.

  None of them spoke. One started crying. Elise bent down to give the little kid a hug.

  “They are obviously hiding from Wuzha and his men. Don’t you see?” Elise said to Chad. “Don’t cry, we’re the good guys!” She padded the boy in her arms on the back lightly, then when the boy stopped his fake sobbing, she handed him over to Chad.

  “Look at the hands of this statue,” she commented, staring admiringly at it.

  “What about her hands?”

  “The way they are positioned is called a mudra, a hand gesture. Each mudra is said to have special magical power. I wonder what this one means.” Before Chad could say another word, she put her hands together and recreated the hand gesture of the Buddha statue with them.

  An unexpected white ray from nowhere illuminated her body, she turned almost semi-transparent in it. The children and Chad looked at the change in awe. The boy who was crying started it again, unsure whether the woman who said she was one of the good guys was being earnest. How could a regular person cause a vision like this?

  Elise let out a yelp herself as an unfamiliar voice boomed in her ears.

  “ELISE,” it said. She thought it was the Gautama Buddha again, but it was not. The voice belonged to an old man, hoarse with a suppressed hint of excitement. Elise looked incredulously at Chad as her body was lifted an inch off the ground, her body swathed by a ray of light that appeared to have pierced through the intact roof of the temple. She grappled for Chad’s arm to stop herself from being lifted completely off the ground and broke the mudra. Instantly, the magic was lost and gravity took hold of her once again.

  “What was that?!” Chad said. “It was almost like you were being abducted by aliens!”

  “The mudra, the mudra of this Buddha statue did something.”

  The children took the hint and climbed off the statue’s throne so that Elise and Chad could read the inscription on its back.

  The Sahasrara, door to pure consciousness, it said.

  “I heard a voice. Maybe this is the one that will let us communicate with others telepathically! Let me try it again!” Elise said excitedly to Chad.

  “Let me try, too!” Chad said, dropping the kid on the ground. They looked on curiously at the adults who seemed to believe in pure fantasy wring their hands together in funny ways.

  “Black Commissioner, Black Commissioner!” Chad laced his fingers just like Elise did but left his little fingers on both hands pointing upwards. He chanted the name of the person he wanted to see most as he pulled his hands closed to his abdomen just like the statue.

  “Michael Siu, I need to talk to you…” Elise murmured under her breath herself.

  “ELISE!” She heard Michael’s unmistakable voice as a ray of light once again illuminated her, making her skin glowed. His voice had a reverberating quality to it and it rung inside her cranium with an echo. “Elise, what are you doing out there? Come to us at the command center. It’s not safe over there
.”

  “Yes! That’s exactly why I want to talk to you! We don’t know the way! Luckily, the mudra gave me special power. I am connected to you telepathically!”

  “Where are you now?”

  “I’m in the Prince Hau Temple on the South Western side of the Walled City.”

  “Stay there! I’ll send someone.”

  Chad was starting to feel the jealous pang of disappointment when she saw that Elise was once again enshrouded by a shaft of light while he was not despite performing the exact same hand trick. But then felt a rap on his shoulder, followed by a chilling draft that made his skin’s hair raised. He turned around to find Black Commissioner in massive black robe floating in mid-air behind him, crossing his arms with a smirk on his hideous face as the kids screamed in horror and ducked behind Chad for cover.

  “No way!!” Chad screamed in joy. “It worked!”

  “What worked?” Black Commissioner asked indignantly. As he spoke, the frightened children could see his long, blood red tongue rolled inside his equally bloody mouth with no teeth. They screamed even louder. Black Commissioner landed on the ground and pulled apart his hair in annoyance to take a good look at them.

  “The mudra! I didn’t know I have the gift, too!” Chad replied excitedly. “That worked better than I thought. I have only just summoned you and there you are!”

  “You SUMMONED me?!” Black Commissioner snorted, but didn’t correct him. He found it amusing to keep him in the dark. “I’m here to take you guys back to safety. Come at once!” He opened his arms to let them hold on to his robes, but Elise didn’t move. No, she couldn’t.

  “ELISE,” the old man’s voice from earlier sounded in Elise’s head once more, and he knew her Chinese name. He must have been an old acquaintance. “ELISEEE…”