Page 112 of The Girl with a Thousand Faces
Once that conflict is well underway, it will be time for you to get to the civic buildings and start freeing ghosts.
Focus on that next step, you decide, and then see how you feel.
Perhaps if you can expend enough rage and hurt on others, that pain which haunts you will finally ease.
PART
FOUR
35THE TRANSMIGRATION OF MERCY CHAN
August 21, 1975 (Yesterday)
For the second time in her long existence, Mercy Chan awoke underwater.
Her first sensation was one of confinement. The space she occupied was small, barely enough for her body to cram into, limbs folded tight to her chest. The sides of it were metallic, rusty, and curved; some kind of storage barrel.
The same one that Thousand-Faced Girl had shoved her into.
Panic set in. Mercy twisted in frantic flurries of motion. There was a horrible wet sogginess to her lungs that she didn’t like. She needed to get out of here, to breathe. Her hands shot up, seeking a rim to pull up against, and instead, her palms slammed against a well-fixed lid.
There was no exit. She was sealed in.
Fury and fear blended with her panic. Mercy pounded against the sides of the barrel with closed fists.The lid, she thought. Surely the lid will be the weakest point.
She braced her feet on the floor of the barrel, as much as she could in such a tight space, tucked her chin to her chest, and slammed her shoulders upward. And again, and again.
It should have hurt. The force she was applying was enough to bruise anyone’s shoulders. Yet she felt nothing except a deep panic to get out, get up to air, get to where she could breathe. How was she even still alive? It had been minutes without breathing. A distant part of Mercy was aware of this, but refused to think about it because the alternative was hideous. Instead, she kept trying.
On the seventh slam, the lid gave way, barrel falling over from the force of her motion. Mercy slopped out of the drum on hands and knees amidst a splurge of water.
From darkness, into darkness. The room was small, barely the size of a large closet, and half full of water. The only light came from a small grate in the ceiling.
No, not a “room”; that was the wrong description. The walls were slick withmold and slime, the “water” dank and fetid, with an overpowering scent of rot. There were no doors or windows or any exit except that grate.
Mercy tried to breathe. Instead of easing, her pain intensified. Dry air scraped her skin raw, drowned lungs straining futilely to inhale. A transcendent horror kicked in, feral and spiraling. Mercy attempted to scream, couldn’t manage it. Thrashed like a fish out of water.
Dying is not the end for you.
Shivering, Mercy looked down at herself for the first time.
Her hands were unnaturally elongated, the fingers ending in nails that curved long like claws. Her body, if it could be called that, was a starved and emaciated scrap, skin tinged the color of bile, the edges of herself indistinct and blurred. Gaunt, withered, deadly.
Corporeal… almost. But not quite.
Slowly, anxiously, she turned around.
Her body, or what she had long thought of as her body, lay crammed at the bottom of the barrel, waterlogged and unmoving. It had drowned in there, and she hadn’t even noticed in her panic to get out, or else had mistaken its limbs for her own.
There was no hiding from the truth anymore. She died in that barrel, and her spirit was peeled away.
The fear and panic faded, replaced by a curious calm. Even the crushing pressure in her lungs seemed bearable, all of sudden, like an old auntie whom you found exasperating but had nonetheless gotten used to over the years.
A glimmering reflection caught her eye; something was written on the walls. Mercy took a step forward. Red paint formed sloppy characters; the strokes dripped with moisture. But it was readable, if only just.
From Shore Sister to Sea Sister: may we always be friends forever.
She had seen these words before, written on a scrap of paper. The heart of a lonely girl, offered up freely and stuffed into fragile glass. Once belonging to—
