Page 75 of The Girl with a Thousand Faces
Clawed, green fingers, snaking around your wrist.
No one else remembers me.
The sharks who feared to approach, watching you from the depths.
It was an accident.
Words crowd in your head, only to fade in your throat. Hot and cold, hot and cold. Your body moves from flushed to a slight shiver, and back again; your hand, still clutched in her emaciated grasp.
“Ghost!” you cry, ripping free of her. “You are a dead person, like the other islanders, up in the village!”
She nods her head slightly, a single dip and lift of the chin.
“It was you.” The words croak from your throat. “The little girl I dreamed of. The one who summons storms, and speaks to spirits.”
Sea Sister hides her face. She looks like she wants to cry and you remember what she told you days or perhaps weeks ago, that sorrow is silent beneath the sea.
Idiot.Idiot.
You should have figured it out sooner.
Except, a small part of you has always known. If you’re truly, unflinchingly honest. This is a ghost island, after all, according to the people on the mainland—a place inhabited and overrun by its former storm-wracked villagers.
What else could Sea Sister have ever been, but another one of Shek Ham Chau’s lost spirits? No different from the creeping, selfish dead who hound your mother day and night.
Worse, in fact, because this girl and her rage are what summoned a storm and killed the village. She’s not just a dead child. She’s an angry, twisted,vengefuldead child, and she has brought you to the place she died so that you can die where she died, your corpse keeping her remains company.
A terrible revulsion is growing in you, where there was only certainty and excitement before.
“Please let me go home,” you whisper. “I want to see my mother!”
Home?She lifts her head from her hands.But you said you wanted to be like me. To become as I am, free and strong and forever swimming. We will be together in the ocean, forever and ever and ever.
Her words fill you with ice. You thought she was your friend, but she was only doing what a ghost always does: trying to charm its victims, for its own dark reasons. How many stories have you read or heard about ghosts who trick men into marrying them? About demons who weasel their way into homes, only to kill at their leisure?
How stupid you’ve been.
“Sea Sister, you are dead, and I am alive!” The shout tears from your throat. “The dead have no claim on the living. I want to go home!”
No. NO. This isn’t how it was supposed to go!Sea Sister bares her teeth, head thrown back. The temperature in the cavern drops from cool to a crisp chill. You shiver violently, teeth clacking.Everyone leaves me. It isn’t fair! You were supposed to be my friend! MY FRIEND. That is why I brought you here, to where I died. I trusted you toloveme, when you saw how they treated me!
She reaches for you, claws extended, and fear snaps your paralysis like a shard of ice. You leap away from her, back into the temple.
Come here! Come here, right now!Sea Sister surges out of the water to follow, but stops at the temple’s doorway. She does not cross the threshold; can’t set foot on it. Her pitiless dead gaze bores into you. How did you ever find such a creature beautiful, or loving?
Sea Sister senses her mistake. She tries to soften, baring her teeth in a smile.Come out, Siu Yin. It is time to swim.
“Where are we swimming to?” you call back, shakily.
You said you wanted to be like me. Don’t you still want that?
“I thought you were a jiaoren, not a ghost! Youtrickedme!”
Sea Sister shrieks like an oncoming train and you clap both hands over your ears, because the sound is unbearably loud in this echoing cavern. She is in a rage, and it is the rage of a child being thwarted.
Surrounded by a swell of water, she flings herself against the temple doorway.
Water floods through, leaving you soaked and gasping. But that’s all it is: ocean water. She cannot pass temple doors as a ghost. Not now, not ever. Even in this forgotten place, my presence has a power she can’t defy.
