Page 33 of The Girl with a Thousand Faces
Cobra Lily definitely,definitelywasn’t in here. So where the hell had she gone?
“Fuck a crab,” Mercy said aloud.
There had to be a secret door in here. That was the only explanation. She stood up, glancing once at the dresser table with its mess of jewelry and cosmetics.
A ghost peered up from the basin.
Mercy swore in shock, grasping her knife tight. She leaned over the wide ceramic bowl.
Her own reflection was gone, replaced by the apparition of an elegant, oval-faced woman, perhaps early thirties in age—the same one who’d just walked out in the flesh, moments before. Her skin looked damp, as did her hair, like she’d recently washed in a basin.
Or been drowned in one.
“You must be the ghost of the young lady who I just saw walking out of this room,” Mercy said, low. “How is it possible that your spirit has been separated from your body?”
Another thought, more horrible: If this lady was dead, what was living in her skin? This strange business was getting worse by the minute.
The young woman opened her mouth as if to speak, but reflections could only be silent. Her lips trembled. She was a weak spirit, contained in a vase’s worth of water.
“Are you dead, little sister?” Mercy knew the answer, but when talking with ghosts, it was important to find out what they knew, too. Some thought they were still alive, and needed gentle correction.
The woman nodded, her face mournful. She was well aware of her own status.
“When did this happen?”
Hesitantly, the spirit held up a finger and sketched something out. Her fingers did not break the surface, but her touch was sufficient to displace ripples.
“Eight,” Mercy hazarded. It wasn’t easy, trying to read backward-facing Chinese characters invisibly traced underneath water. “Eight what, days?”
Red Bird shook her head.
“Weeks? Months?”
A shake, a pause, then a nod.
“Eightmonths,” Mercy said, faintly. That was a terribly long time to be trapped in a basin. “And no one noticed?”
A helpless shrug from the ghost.
“Who killed you? Who took your body?”
Red Bird put her face in her hands, shoulders quivering with silent sobs. She either did not know, or could not say. Ghosts often found their own murders hard to face.
“Don’t worry about it,” Mercy said, conscious of the time bleeding away. “Can we help each other? I’m looking for—for someone who was in here, very recently. I think she might know your killer, or be involved somehow. Do you know where she went?”
She would never have spoken to a ghost so boldly in normal circumstances, but Cobra Lily might come back into this room at any point, and she did not want to rely on getting lucky a second time.
Within the reflection, the dead woman pointed behind Mercy, as best she could while trapped in a basin.
Mercy spun round. Nothing to see. She glanced back at the basin; nothing in the reflection either, anymore. The mysterious woman had dispersed, for now.
She put her knife away and stepped toward the wall, next to the bed. She thought, though she wasn’t sure, that this was the general direction the ghost had indicated. Nothing unusual stood out. She peered more closely.
A mosaic of small tiles adorned the wall, beautiful and intricate, arranged to form the image of a flower, possibly a lily—hard to tell, it was so stylized. Looking more closely, Mercy was struck by the realization that one of the little tiles did not line up, was out of sync with the others. It gave the flower a slightly lopsided appearance.
Mercy ran a finger over the odd tile. Slightly loose, hint of a rattle. She pressed it experimentally, feeling foolish.
The tile sank into the wall, and she swore under her breath. A gentleclunkfollowed, same as the one she’d heard when Cobra Lily had been in here alone.
