Page 78 of The Girl with a Thousand Faces
“They will help,” Mami says, dabbing her eyes. “Heaven bless them, they will help us.” She gets up, knees gone crimson from being pressed to wood. “The ghosts will meet us there with a boat, after they have steered it round the coast. Hurry!”
There is no time to grab more than basics. You throw a few spare clothes into rucksacks, along with some skins of water. None of the food you have is suitable for travel; best to leave it. Grab a rain cape and straw hat, and you’re set to go.
The rain is solid, the sky ink-dark by the time you both step outside again. Time for one last glance at the little house that has been a home for the past four months, and then you’re off. For the first time in what feels like forever, you and your mother have a single shared goal.
It’s another quarter hour of winding paths, mostly overgrown with so little foot traffic on Shek Ham Chau.
Many of the remaining ghosts come with you. They tumble and skip, flutter and creep as appropriate, through the steadily increasing rain. Some on both legs, some on no legs, some on all fours. None are as uniquely adapted and striking as Sea Sister, but then none are as powerful as she.
“Hurry, daughter, hurry!” Mami hisses, picking up the pace.
Soggy and sweating in the growing downpour, the pair of you arrive at therocky beach, where the water grows deep quickly. Bad for swimming, good for boarding a boat.
“Where are they?” Shade your eyes in the gloomy half-light; only this morning, it was bright sun on crystalline waters.
Mami points. “There!”
Incredibly, they have done it. The ghosts have liberated the little fishing boat from the docks where you left it tied. The fishermen spirits prove surprisingly adept at fading in and out of corporeality as they take it in turn to steer its course.
It’s a bit of difficulty getting to the boat, but you manage. It can come into shallow water, being small, but not all the way into shore. The ghost fishermen pull it up close to an outcropping of rock and you both clamber in.
By now, the ghosts behind you are starting to mill in agitation. They seem distressed, with signs you have learned to recognize: teeth baring, heads swiveling, seeking danger. Those who can speak are whispering or muttering.
“What’s wrong with them, Mami?”
Then you hear it, echoing through the rising winds: the high-pitched scream of a little girl.
“Sea Sister,” you whisper.
“Let’s go!” Mami picks up the oars to begin rowing, and so do you.
Ten feet from shore, lightning strikes.
God-bright beams come arcing from above. The first bolt lashes the assembled ghosts, branching into multiple forks which each hit a different spirit.
The second bolt hits you.
A booming clap drowns out all other noise. White heat strikes every nerve in your body, pain like a million acupuncture needles, and then blankness. For a split second you exist in a place without sound, sight, or feeling. Then your eyes open, your lungs gasp, skin tingling as a body-wide ache sets in.
The blast has flung you clean out of the boat, slammed you into the water. Everything hurts and you smell like a bonfire.
Ears ringing, vision blurred, you struggle to the surface of the ocean, miraculously still conscious, fighting the choppy water. At least all those months with Sea Sister have made you a good swimmer. There is blood coming from your ears, your nostrils, your mouth. A livid burn sears down one shoulder, as if lightning has patterned itself on you; it hurts like hell.
On the shore, the milling ghosts are gone, either frightened away or temporarily dispersed. The fisherman ghost who steered the boat is also gone.
Again, that eerie cry on the wind. Only now it is more of a howl, a screamheard through the rising storm. The typhoon is landing, and somewhere at its heart is the anguished water ghost of Shek Ham Chau.
“She’s here.” Mami sits frozen on the boat, eyes so wide that the veins show around the edges. “My sister is here!”
“Wait!” You are trying to swim toward her even as the current carries the boat away, but feel so dizzy, sick, and weak. “Bring… the boat… closer! Please!”
Mami doesn’t appear to hear you, or else no longer cares. “No, no, no,” she cries. “I refuse to face her again!”
You cannot believe what you are hearing. “Mami, don’t go!”
She begins rowing, then, energetically throwing her weight into the oars, crying and gibbering incomprehensibly. Complete terror has driven her over the edge.
“Mami?” A wave rolls you under and you struggle yet again to the surface, pummeled by rain and battered by wind. Still bleeding and burned from the lightning strike. “Mami, wait for me!”
