Page 74 of The Girl with a Thousand Faces
The tide rises.
No one comes.
Every so often you try moving your legs, pinching them even, but it’s as if the legs are no longer there, just a strange and inanimate curiosity attached to the body.
Even sitting up, the water is at your chest now. Your head is clear and you can breathe, though not for much longer. However, your body is floating, you realize. Eventually, you’ll sink again. But for now, it’s a help; you can move, slightly. Enough for one last effort, one last burst of energy.
You twist round, crawling on your hands, dead legs buoyed by the ocean. Crawl inch by agonizing inch into the temple and hold on to the carved statue of Kwun Yam. Things are not working in your body. Dark patches of bruising are spreading all along your skin; you feel cold, a sickly chill in your very marrow that simply will not abate. Small cuts abound, trickling with blood. Still, you persevere.
Ocean water rushes into the cavern, and you begin to flounder. There is very little light here, just darkness and water and echoes braided with shadows. Grab the statue, struggling to pull yourself a little higher out of the tide.
A soft meow; you look up.
Your cat is there, or rather his spirit is. Still small and white, the way he died when the men of the village crushed his head with a rock out of spite. He deserved better, and you were relieved when his ghost returned.
“Bao,” you say, softly, and it fills you with wavering joy to see him.
The cat curls in the crook of Lady Kwun Yam’s arm. He peers down at you with red, red eyes.
“Goddess,” you rasp, and the stone temple catches your soft words, flinging them around the crags and crevices of the walls and ceiling. “Please do not forget about me, the way my village has. Please remember my death!”
Almost, you could swear that the statue turns its head, ever so slightly, to look down.
The tides flood as you dip a finger into your own blood, and write your name on the statue’s cold surface. And because you want to be sure, you don’t just write it once. You write everywhere you can reach on Kwun Yam’s statue. Even if the water washes some of it away, you keep doing it. There’s plenty of blood, at least.
Over and over, you beg the silent goddess to remember you, pleading with the heavens and the underworld and any other being you think will listen, to let you return as a ghost.
“Let me catch them,” you whisper into the dark, “and hold them, and drag them to the water, and keep them down until their blood is salt and their eyes are food for fishes, and there is nothing left of them but empty skin!”
It is the curse of a little child: simple, repetitive, mean-spirited as only children can be when angered.
The villagers were right in one respect: you do have a kind of power. When you are angry, bad things can happen. And now you are angrier and sadder than you have ever been. Though you cannot prevent your own death, you can certainly twist your own spirit in the process.
You don’t know that, not yet. All you know at this point is exhaustion, and agony. Pain conquers every part of your body that you can still feel; numbness has claimed the rest.
Alone and defeated, you open your mouth to the waiting sea and draw it in like breath—
The ghost dream fades.
You are yourself once more: cold, damp, shivering in a dark cave. Nose to nose with Sea Sister, her forehead pressed against yours, her horrifying gaze locked with your own.
Fear rockets through your body. You’ve been close to her before, swum side-by-side and face-to-face, but it’s different now, in this sacred place, with the glamour stripped from your eyes.
For beneath that cold skin, she is made of stillness: no heartbeat, no rush of blood, no intake of breath. She is not thin from hunger or malnutrition, but from decay. Internal organs she no longer needs have atrophied into almost nothing.
She is no mermaid, nor even a monster. Sea Sister is a corporeal spirit.
Shuigui. Water ghost.
I don’t think you should go swimming.
A memory rises in your mind: Mami’s anxious face, the first day you arrived.
You will stay out of the water.
Sea Sister, beautiful and dangerous, sharp-toothed and luminous.
In the ocean, no one can cry without drowning.
