The House of Life 3

by Vann Chow

  “Who are you?” She asked, as her body was lifted into the air. She felt her skin not only glow, but burnt by the white light hitting her skin. In the blinding light, she witnessed herself being incinerated by the rays. White smokes rose from her everywhere.

  “Elise! What’s happening?!” Chad reached out to pull her down to no avail. The children had gathered around her and helped what little they could. With their tiny hands, they clutched at her clothes and pulled. “Is Michael trying to teleport her or something?” Chad asked the Commissioner who would surely have seen such phenomenon.

  “No, I have never seen this before. This doesn’t look good,” he flew to Elise’s side and tried to shield her from the ray of light that was slowly consuming her with his magical robe. When the light broke through even him and his bewitched robe which, like a black hole, no light could ever penetrate, he knew something was definitely wrong. “Break the mudra,” Black Commissioner shouted at Elise.

  The mudra Elise was making was called the Crown Sahasrara, and it allowed the person who wield it to be connected to others on spiritual levels. The person herself entered into a trance. If someone with bad intention tampered with the process, the person’s soul could be transported away against his or her own will. Black Commissioner couldn’t hear the voice in Elise’s head, but given current situation, he half-guessed that it must have something to do with Wuzha Sam. Could he have detected the spiritual opening in Elise and diverted her attention to him as if someone tapping phone lines? Was he trying to kidnap Elise, too, as ransom in order to extort the young master for the Book of Life and Death?

  “Break the mudra!” He shouted at her again as he flailed his arms desperately, grappling at them to break her hands away from each other, but Elise had dematerialized into nothing but smokes in a blink of an eye.

  Demands

  Elise fell softly on the floor of a large, unfamiliar hall in semi-darkness. A white Persian cat leaped out from under her dress to her surprise and jumped off towards something in the darkness ahead. Elise pulled her hands apart in order to prop herself up, breaking the Sahasrara mudra gesture. A rush of movements from figures hidden in the dark edges of the room made her head turned left then right, disoriented. Then someone shouted her Chinese name, as if to announce her arrival.

  A quick shuffling of feet and a series of heavy footsteps, accompanied by the harrowing sound of metal scrapping the hard, tiled floor could be heard. Men carrying weapon of some sort, Elise thought. She had been abducted, and her kidnappers were going to assail her.

  Because she couldn’t see much in the semi-darkness, she sniffed hard and was half-expecting the lurch-inducing smell of rotten flesh, but instead, she was confronted with mouth-salivating fragrance of … cakes?

  “ELISE,” it was that voice again, but now no longer just a voice in her head. Its speaker was right in front of her. The unknown man reached out a hand to lift her up. She could see the unmistakable light blue embroidered cuff attached to the black silk sleeves of the Qing bannerman’s court uniform of the outstretched arm. “Are you quite all right?” The voice asked her kindly. A suppressed excitement could be heard in his tone.

  Elise brushed his hand away and snapped, “Who are you?”

  “How dare you act disrespectfully to our Third Lord?” A man to the side accused her.

  Third Lord?

  Elise rose to her feet and stepped backwards. The speaker followed her movement and stepped forward instead, revealing himself from under the shadow. “It’s you, Wuzha Sam, the bandit leader,” Elise observed. “What do you want from me?” She looked behind her to find that she didn’t have much more space to back up. A band of stern-face servants, men and women both, had lined the wall of the room. Instead of what Elise expected, they had on their hands different kinds of freshly baked confectionary.

  “Set the table! Hurry!” Wuzha hissed at his servants, who one by one laid the olfactory treats on a small round wooden table set with a marble top in front of them and excused themselves.

  “You must be starving, poor girl,” Wuzha shook his head and led Elise to sit at the beautifully carved wooden stool on one side of the table and occupied himself another on the opposite side. “I’ve asked the nice people of his household to prepare these pastries for you. These are all your favorites.”

  “My favorites?” Elise squinted to look at what was on the table under the weak illumination provided by a single burning red candle in the center of the table. She had never seen or eaten any of these pastries before, though she immediately recognized from their sophisticated forms and fragrances to be of old, forgotten recipes from prominent Manchurian palace and courts. A great deal of nuts and flower petals were used. Elise took in a whiff of their sweet smell and was immediately full. The sensation suddenly reminded her starkly that she was a ghost, relying on her nose to ‘feed’ herself.

  “You never know when to stop eating,” Wuzha laughed, “just like when you were young.”

  “Do I know you?” Elise asked, confused.

  “You are my daughter, Wang Mei,” Wuzha reached out his hand to take Elise’s, which she retracted quickly and hid under the table cloth. That made Wuzha correct himself. “You were my daughter. You don’t remember anything now, but you will. I’ll help you.”

  It took just a few milliseconds for Elise to figure out what he meant. “You don’t mean I’m my own great-grandmother, do you?” All the talk with Michael about reincarnations and her once Manchurian root now came flooding back into her mind.

  “You look just like her,” Wuzha smiled amiably, appraising her. “You are her. It’s all written in the Books. You’re the Heaven’s gift to me. After a hundred years of excruciating wait, you’re now finally sitting right in front of me. We’re once more reunited, Elise. The two of you, born almost a hundred years apart, even shared the same name. What does one call this if not destiny? I’ll never abandon you again, my dear. Not in a hundred, thousand or million years. Never again.” His eyes were wet, lined with thin red veins, his lips trembling with emotions. Elise was utterly shocked by the man’s words, but even more so by his seemingly genuine demeanor.

  “You did all these…” Elise didn’t want how to describe Wuzha’s raid of the Chamber of Life and Nutrition, the kidnapping and killing of Celestial Court officials, and the burning of the Grand Medicine Cabinet, “just so you could see your daughter again? What about the Book of Life and Death? Isn’t that what you are after?”

  “For years, I have no news of you despite my search up and down the country. I have sent scouts to every corner of this vast cruel land. From the Eastern coast to the Western desert, and from the Northern mountains to the Southern valleys, my search came up empty. It was only at your death that, I felt for the first time in the last hundred years your actual, metaphysical presence in the Flux. I thought it was just the effect of your diary, a possession that belonged to you once upon a time being transported here along with your death. I perused everything that was in it and sieved through every word and every clue it provided, and it was then I realized that the signal I felt was much stronger than just your lingering touches on it. The vibrations I felt were coming from your actual lingering soul. It was then I knew I had to get the Book of Life and Death to find out where you were…”

  “But I didn’t need it anymore,” Wuzha continued, “the old man from the Chamber has told me everything. He was the living, breathing book himself. Everything about everyone who has ever lived and died in Hong Kong was in his head. He could burn the Book but the memory of its content will still be in his head.” Then his voice assumed a darker tone, and he said, “there’s nothing the sting of pain couldn’t do.”

  “Where is he now?” Elise asked, alarmed at the suggestion that Master Siu had been tortured for information. “Now that you’ve found what you’ve come to seek, you must let him go!”

  “My dear, don’t you worry about this. Let me handle everything,” he said, waving a servant over to take Elise to a room i
n the back. “I still have a lot of unfinished business on this earth.” And he was heard to crack his knuckles.

  Negotiation

  No particularly happy with his task, Maide balanced the round dining table from Commander Bao’s grand-nephew’s apartment set with a pot of freshly brewed Da Hong Pao (Red Robe) tea and two porcelain cups over his head. White Commissioner flew in front of him, shielding him from bullets of the Qing riflemen from above with his grand white robe made of millions of tiny amalgam antimony and bismuth metal threads weaved together.

  When he was close enough, he unfurled his mouth, which rolled down almost to his knees and parted the wall of long black hair from his face. The rain of bullets stopped as he expected, as he opened his mouth to speak. He waved at Maide to set the table down next to him, directly in front of the Southern gate.

  “General Wuzha and Soldiers of the Blue Banner! We have come to negotiate!” He said with a voice that came from the depth of his body. It didn’t sound like him at all but of a powerful, foul creature that lived under his skin. Maide flinched when he heard White Commissioner’s unexpected voice involuntarily and almost knocked over one of the tea cups on the table. White Commissioner hissed at him and returned his attention to the faceless towers. “My master has asked me to bring you a gift. A gift we have retrieve from the hands of corrupted colonizers and Hell officials and brought back to you all the way from the Four Rivers,” he moved aside to reveal what his gigantic white robes was blocking. Skinny Bones and Noqai could be seen dragging behind them the net with fifteen crates of Qing silver towards them. White Commissioner waved his arm and Skinny Bones extracted the open crate from the mesh of the ropes. Ceremoniously, White Commissioner picked up a silver ingot and held it up against the mid-day sun. Its metallic body gleamed in the sunlight ever more strongly than they had seen. “These are your properties, General Wuzha. Do you recognize them? They had been illegally seized from your mansion in Tsingdao when you were stationed there. It will be rightfully returned to you finally, if we can reach a satisfactory negotiation today!”

  The White Commissioner and his helpers stood in silence as they waited for a reply. Maide looked up at the sky. Gauging from the position of the sun, it was nearing noon, the deadline.

  Then they heard the loud creaking sound of the Southern Gate opening. A single horse rider rode out from the fortress with something in his arm. It was only when he was not fifty meters from them did they see what it was. It was a black dog.

  “The master is pleased with your offer,” he said, looking down at them from horseback. “You can have him back,” he flung the dog onto the ground. It groaned in pain. Several places on his body had been bitten off and were bleeding profusely.

  Noqai had always a soft heart from animal. He sprinted over and drew the dog in his arms to examine its injuries. “This is not Master Ken,” he lifted his head to say to the White Commissioner, whose face twitched in agitation.

  “We most certainly thank your Master for confronting the HMS Imperieuse and the Hell’s Guard, nearly killing his entire crew, for our sake,” the man said insincerely and added a cold laugh at the end of his words. “All the same, we want the Book of Life and Death by midday, or we’ll chop off the heads of Master Siu and that of the black dog you’re looking for, and have them hung in front of the Main Gate by noon,” he hissed and turned around to leave.

  “Hold on! May I interest you in some tea while we talk this out?” White Commissioner offered. “You and I both know that there is no way we’re going to hand over the sacred text to you. It will be high treason if we do and none of us will be able to keep our heads on our shoulders all the same. Tell me, what is it that your master really wants?”

  “Revenge!” The horse rider’s eyes lit up in a fiery red and he let his horse charged forward and kicked the table over. The tea from the pot spilled to the ground and its steaming content oozed and bubbled the sands. “Ha! And as expected, you have put a spell water in the tea you offered to the negotiator.” He shook his head in disbelief at their naivety. “Which one is it? Will I die in seven steps? Or will I explode as soon as I get back to the city?”

  “Neither,” the White Commissioner answered calmly, “it’s will simply purge the evil thought within you, so that you can come to your senses.”

  “You have less than three minutes,” the rider announced. “Go and tell your master to bring the Book over himself, or we will execute a poor soul from the city every minute, your old Master included!” Behind him, a queue of men, women and children bounded in their hands by ropes in frightfulness were being led out of gate and were made to kneel in a row. They were lingering souls that had hidden in the Walled City for heavens-know-how-long, but today they might meet their fate, finally.

  “Tschaa!” The messenger kicked the flank of his horse and rode off towards the South Gate.

  “We did all these for nothing?!” Skinny Bones threw his arms up in exasperation after the man disappeared once more behind the gate.

  “No,” the White Commissioner said, shaking his head. “We’ve found out what Wuzha’s really after. Hang on to my robe, we’ll fly back at once!”

  “And we’re leaving all these gold?” Skinny Bone couldn’t believe what White was saying.

  “Yes!” He hissed his order. Gold was nothing but some useless minerals to him.

  ***

  Elise was thrown into another room. The guards locked the doors immediately behind her. This room was very well decorated, unlike anything she could expect from a room for a mere hostage. In fact, it seemed to have been redecorate after the style of a room elsewhere, as its appearance was incongruous with the earlier hall and the corridor through which she was taken to arrive here. Despite its concrete walls and lack of windows, several pair of tall Chinese windows were painted to its three sides. Between the red paints that made out of intricate pattern of typical Chinese dwellings were shapes alluding to something else Elise couldn’t make out in the dark.

  A single candle had been lit up on a side table. Elise took the candle holder in one hand and held it up in the middle of the room to reveal the beautiful painted landscape of a city by the bay. Even birds in the sky and distant fishing vessels at the mouth of the bay were depicted in great details, she realized, as she walked around the room with the candle.

  Something almost tripped her over as she was making the round. She let the light from the candle illuminated the thing that block her way. It was a beautifully carved antique camphor chest. The key was already in its lock, tempting Elise to turn it. She put the candle stand down on the ground beside her and unlock the chest.

  The chest was overflowing with toys, toys that were as old as the chest that would have stirred no interest to any modern kid. Yet Elise couldn’t contain her curiosity. This is obviously a recreation of her great-grandmother Elise’s childhood room. And these toys were placed here for her, to conjure up favorable memories of her past life. Carefully, Elise take out the items in it one by one. There were a great many porcelain dolls, the Barbies and Kens of the late eighteen hundred. There was also a small tricycle with a rag doll on it. A few small wooden ponies in white, brown and yellow were stuck in the crevices of it. Elise reached further to find a tangled mess of necklaces and bracelets made out of stringed pearls and seashells that showed her great-grandmother’s craftiness. But at the bottom were something unexpected. There were model trains and some broken miniature rail tracks, next to it were a sailboat with broken sails and, to Elise’s surprise, a small metallic toy gun. She couldn’t help but noticed that these last bunch were distinctively toys for boys, not girls.

  Made decades ago when plastic didn’t exist, the silver gun looked and felt almost like a real one, except in miniature size. She fished it out from the chest carefully and played with it, making loud clicking noises as it fired empty shots.

  “Is someone there on the other side?!” A muffled girl’s voice could be heard from the next room. “Is someone there?!”

 
“Who’s this?” Elise put the gun into her pocket and pushed her ear to the wall.

  “Elise?” The girl said. “Is that you, Elise?”

  “Yes…?” She replied, not sure whether the girl on the other side was speaking of her or her grandmother.

  “Oh, my dear! They’ve got you, too!”

  “Do I know you?” Elise asked embarrassed. “I’m sorry, but I’m quite disoriented in this realm. I can’t place your voice…”

  “It’s Chamomile! I’m Michael and Ken’s cousin. You’ve seen me at the banquet three days ago.”

  “Chamomile!” Elise repeated her name in equal surprise. “I’m so sorry you’ve been dragged into this!”

  “Why are you saying sorry? It’s not your fault!” Chamomile tried to comfort her, obviously did not know that Elise might have been the very thing Wuzha was searching for. “But I could really need a bit of help. The Master is with me, and he’s injured. I don’t know what to do. He has lost consciousness. I felt his pulse and it was very weak.” Chamomile started sobbing. “They tied him up and tortured him for the Book, and when he refused, they threatened to… to rape me…that was why the Master gave. He told Wuzha about the boy.”

  “The boy? What boy?” Elise inquired, her eyes peering naturally at the content of the chest that didn’t fit with the rest.

  “His grandson, his daughter’s lovechild with a German officer, apparently. Who knew what he wanted with the boy!” Chamomile said, her voice faded as she moved away from the wall, seemingly to attend to her grandfather, who must have stirred. “Wake up, granddad. Please wake up!” A moment later, her voice could be heard clearly again. “Elise, please help us. My magic is weak and I have broken one of my leg. You must help us run away. Wuzha made it clear that if the Book of Life and Death is not delivered here by noon, which I am sure it wouldn’t be, he would have the Master killed!”