Page 80 of The Girl with a Thousand Faces
Up you lunge from the ocean floor in a cloud of sand, dust, and murky water. Seagrass and old fishing lines clutter the water. All is darkness but somehow you can see as you shoot straight upward, picking out the swirls of movement from fish and fragmentary lights above.
Burst through the surface of the ocean. A nightly breeze stings your face, the sky a riot of stars above. Each of them is ringed by a nimbus of light, weird and unwaveringly bright.
All this you see in a kaleidoscope moment of perception, absorbing without truly processing. You are too busy trying to breathe to take in anything else. A cold, heavy wetness sits in your lungs that will not go away. Struggling to breathe does nothing but send a twisting sensation through your chest, worsening the pain.
Memory returns to you in drips.
The lightning strike.
She’s here… She’s here!
Electricity flinging you from the boat.
I refuse to face her again.
Your mother, shattered by fear, rowing for her worthless life.
Mami, don’t go—
Waves carrying you back into the ocean. Sea Sister’s face, looming in your vision.
I will always love you.
Fearful and anguished, you lift both hands out of the water. Bone-white fingers, tinged green in the creases and tips. The digits elongated and skeletally thin. The nails have grown into something approaching claws, cruel-looking ones.
These aren’t your hands.
Except… they are.
When you look closely, there is a hint of transparency to your skin. A lightness to your form that belies its size; you weigh almost nothing, can feel that lack in yourself. Your physical body is gone, and all that is left of you is a semi-corporeal spirit.
Shuigui. Dead girl.Water ghost.
Sea Sister has made you like her.
Shiver and wrap both arms round your shoulders. There are no words for the transcendent hurt you’re experiencing. It’s not just the lungs, burning you inside out with a desire for air that cannot be met. It’s everything: Baba’s death, Mami’s abandonment, Sea Sister’s murder.
Every fucking person in your entire fucking life, who has ever mattered in any capacity, has done badly by you. And youhatethem all for it with a power that cascades like a celestial flood.
Where is that disgusting monster, that vile Sea Sister? She was right next to you when you died, promising she’d stay with you forever. Surely she couldn’t have gone far. Didn’t she want to drown you to keep you close to her, after all? Wasn’t that the point?
It occurs to you that your skin isn’t burning, as Sea Sister’s did when she was out of water. Dry, yes, but not withering up. Look up; it is nighttime, judging by the stars and moon. The night sky looks as bright to you as the day. Ghost vision must work differently.
More importantly, it wasn’t night when you first died. Closer to mid-afternoon. Maybe the “returning” of your spirit took a while. Has it been hours? Days? Weeks or months?
Some ghosts come back straightaway. Some don’t return until Hungry Ghost Festival, or at other times of year when the veil is thin between living and dead. Supposedly they spend time flying around to the underworld, but that hasn’t happened to you. Well, not that you remember, anyway. If there are rules about these things, they feel flimsy.
The beach is empty and quiet, the waters bereft of any boats. Your gazefuriously scans the shoreline—and stops, catching on the mouth of the cavern as it yawns beneath the rise of headland cliff.
The cavern, and the temple. Surely, if she has gone anywhere, it is there, where her body lies rotted. At least it’s a place to start. Anger hasn’t gone away but it is, for now, a cold, hard thing, rather than lava in your undead veins.
You dive.
Waves part for you as easily as air, and darkness does not blind your eyes any longer. Dip, dash, slink through the tunnel with unnatural grace, and return again to the cool bliss of the cave.
It looks different to ghostly eyes than it did when you were alive. The temple glows with unpleasant light, raising a faint rash on your skin. No wonder Sea Sister was not able to enter it. Everywhere else in this underground pit heaves and seethes with dark energy, though; the collected misery of an abandoned little girl, and her desperate rage.
The shadows shift, interplaying with the light of the temple. Someone is moving there, near the temple doors where the water is shallowest. Definitely a person.
