Page 109 of The Girl with a Thousand Faces
So many emotions collide that you can barely think or breathe, choking on your own sobs. The whiplash of adoring her, fearing her, hating her, then seeking her all these years, to thinking she was gone, then finally stumbling on her—as a person of local importance, it seems—in this small neighborhood… the staggering breadth of that emotional journey, culminating in this moment, has your head and heart spinning in different directions.
When the storm inside you calms and your skin has run out of human tears, you drag a dirty sleeve across a snotty nose and allow your lungs to take deep, steadying breaths.
Crying is good. Crying is sweet. You’ve learned to value it when in human form, since water ghosts can’t weep. In the wake of that turbulence, your mind is serene and calm again, like the surface of the ocean on a clear summer day.
You know exactly what you want to do, and precisely how you’re going to do it.
Several hours later and you’re back in Kit Ling’s flat, showered and changed and sitting at her desk as you look through all her resources. All her notes and files, her plans and collated knowledge. If you want to make this city suffer, and make Mei Chi understand the pain she’s put you through, then you’ll need every scrap of it.
As Kit Ling, you have access to government records on wartime ghosts. These records indicate that there are 446 “significant spirits” who were captured by teams of Taoist priests and Catholic exorcists, working in tandem, for a few years after World War II ended.
Every single captured ghost was either involved in the resistance, or somehow survived the Japanese occupation. All but a handful had never been a threat to Hong Kong, but their existence had offended the returning government. There was no official term for this operation; it was simply referred to as acity-wide spiritual cleansing.
It’s likely that a majority have expired into nothingness and bad energy, but you are determined to free as many as possible.
The difficulty is in the details. It’s possible to get a few bottle gourds out, as Kit Ling smuggled you out. But start stealing hundreds of ghosts, and you’ll likely get caught. Attempting to set them free is also dicey: there is still a lot of security in the building, and many of them would be recaptured swiftly.
What you need is a way of tying up the city’s resources, even if it is just for a single night, while you launch a multipronged plan from different angles. It is not unlike the sort of military strategies that Wing Yun used to work on, with your help.
You pick up a pen, and start making notes. Hours go by unnoticed. Day darkens into evening, then full night. Still, you work.
Only in the early hours of the morning do you sit back in the chair and stretch. Your stolen body aches, its vision blurry from overuse and its back creaking from being bent over a desk for so long.
The plan, though, is done.
It goes something like this.
First, you’ll keep pursuing Kit Ling’s schemes with regard to Kowloon, because it suits your agenda of punishing Hong Kong, but most importantly, becauseKowloon is her home, and she does not deserve to keep it. Cause havoc in the district, as a ghost—you can do this yourself, though it means getting your hands dirty. Log those deaths, and keep tabs on everything. Use this rocketing rate of murder to push for demolition of Kowloon, and create tensions between the district and the wider Hong Kong government.
Second, arrange for a high-profile murder to happen in Kowloon. Who exactly, you’re not sure yet, but you’ll figure that out when the time comes. This will necessitate a police raid, if handled correctly. They will likely be accompanied by regiments of exorcists and priests, to handle the sheer number of spirits inside.
Third, set a trap within the district. Once the police go in, make sure they’re locked within Kowloon’s walls, busy fighting the triad. Busy fighting ghosts, too, hopefully. This part, you have some ideas for handling; a few options to explore.
Fourth, free the ghosts locked away in civic building basements. With the police busy and chaos rampant, you’re confident of overpowering those who remain.
Fifth, step back and allow the havoc to unfold. Even if only half of those four hundred ghosts have endured, they will be angry and strong, and happy enough to unleash their fury on the city in one explosive wave.
That, combined with much of Hong Kong’s police and supernatural forces being tied up in Kowloon, will batter the city badly.
While all that is happening, you’ll also be dealing with Mei Chi. You have ideas for that, and they cause your lips to twist into a dark grin every time you play out those little scenarios.
This is going to be fun.
34THE PAST CATCHES UP
August 20, 1975 (Two days ago)
It is more than a year before you see “Mercy” again, under very different circumstances.
Across the past months, you’ve relentlessly pursued the demolition paperwork for Kowloon Walled City in your day job as Kit Ling. You also do extensive research on “Mercy” Chan, in your spare time. There is little enough to find: she came to the city as a war refugee, displayed a knack for talking to ghosts, and now works for a known triad leader.
By night, you hunt through Kowloon’s waterways, taking lives and racking up murders, sowing quiet discord. Not that it truly justifies your actions, or makes you feel better, but you try to stick to the cruelest and worst of humanity: the human traffickers, the little drug lords, the abusers and known killers. They are, to your mind, less innocent by far than the soldiers you slaughtered during the war. The only difference is the context in which society views your actions. Killing during wartime is heroism; killing during peacetime is murder.
Some of the bodies you keep, though it takes a while to work out how to store them. That’s new for you; storing bodies wasn’t something you had the luxury of doing, during the war. It requires space, and fu talismans of preservation, and proper access.
Kit Ling’s property in Kowloon proves extremely useful, in that regard. It’s a simple matter to drown her tenant—a drug-addled young woman called Red Bird—and make certain adaptations to its rooms. Chiefly, connecting them to the waterways that run beneath Hong Kong and Kowloon alike, and fitting out a sealed-off underground pumping room as a place to hide spare skins.
You still have a need for some of those identities, even if trying to keep them all straight gets a little tricky at times. Luckily, you don’t need to sleep, and that helps. Some skins you only wear in the day; others only in the night, or at certain times of the week. It all balances out.
