Page 82 of The Girl with a Thousand Faces
The legends about water ghosts vary from place to place, sometimes story to story, but some basics are the same.
First, a person—usually a woman, for most ghosts are women—must die by drowning, and return as a spirit with unfinished business. In stories, she spends many years feeling lonely and lost, consumed with the perpetual agony of suffocation, yet afraid or unable to leave the one place she haunts. Trauma is familiar, and always calls us back.
When a victim finally approaches the body of water where she lurks, the woman’s spirit lures them into the water. Sometimes she does this through seduction and sometimes through a hypnotic spell; the details on this vary. Others will simply grab anyone foolish enough to go swimming during Ghost Month, when the undead are strongest.
Once she and they are both in the water, she will pull them down into the depths and hold them there until they drown.
It is here the stories begin to differ. Some say that once a victim is dead, the water ghost can rest, its spirit journeying on toward the underworld and eventual rebirth. Both souls simply pass on.
Other stories have a darker claim. They say that when the soul has detached from the body, the water ghost can inhabit the skin that remains, her corrupted spirit possessing the empty shell her victim has left behind.
In that version, she climbs out to dry land, encased in the body of the person she’s just drowned. And their spirit—if it is not dispersed before it can form—becomes a new water ghost. Taking her vacated place. Thus the cycle of pain continues, passed from one person to another like a torch of misery.
That is how it went, for you and Sea Sister.
You, as her niece, were the first foot across the threshold of her heart in many years. Yours were the first acts of kindness, the first gifts. Your compassion obliterated her loneliness and she loved you like a daughter, like a sister, like a friend. For a time, her anger had been quelled.
But ghosts are not rational. Ghosts are what is left of a soul who has been so hurt that their pain lingers, imprinting on the corporeal world. When you rejected her, she lost control.
Sea Sister was lonely, so she tried to keep you. Sea Sister was a water ghost, so she tried to drown you. It is not an excuse, and she is still guilty.
But I am telling you this so that you will understand: even if you had stayedwith her, as she demanded, she would still have drowned you. There was nothing you could have done. It is difficult for ghosts to think clearly, doubly so for those who die as children. As you yourself will soon find out.
Her anger-fueled storm hit Shek Ham Chau like a kick to the throat, just as it did all those years ago when she first died. The lightning that struck you was born of a spirit’s anguished heart. The wave that swept you back was the force of her desperation. Her arms, as she bore you down into the darkness, had the strength of grief.
Then you died, and she was left holding an empty shape.
The sense that your body was a husk, a hollow, an empty thing, began to grow in her mind. It looked to her like a dress waiting to be draped across her spirit, a coat longing to engulf her form.
And she leaped into your dead, lifeless body. A thing she had never done before.
The feeling was exquisite and horrifying all at once. Decades of pain fell away in an instant. One moment she was pressing her cheek to yours and the next your cheek was hers: heavy and real, flesh and blood. Suddenly a person again, after a lifetime as a ghost.
Sea Sister floated, deep underwater.
Then the weight of drowning crushed back down, all the worse for having been briefly alleviated; she had nearly forgotten what it was like not to have sodden lungs. Except now that dim memory was a bright and recent experience. She struggled to the surface, broke the water. Gasped air for the first time in decades, stunned and aghast.
The unexpected happened.
Hands grabbed her as she surfaced, hauling her up. Hands wearing military sleeves, attached by arms to men dressed in Japanese uniforms.
Was it luck that a stray ocean patrol should be diverted by Sea Sister’s storm, and find her/you floating in the ocean? Or a curse of the heavens? Either way, it was not my doing, and that is the course of events as they occurred.
“She’s alive!” one of the men shouted, while someone else yelled, “It’s only a local girl! Throw her back!”
An argument broke out. The invaders were enemies to the region, but still human. Some of them were men with daughters or sisters, and felt they should help. Others disagreed.
She tried to stand, and collapsed against the soldier who had pulled her out. Something was wrong. Your body had been injured badly, bleeding, and thoughshe was now in it, it was still barely functioning. The right lung couldn’t breathe at all. No air. Suffocating all over again.
Everything is wrong, she thought, dizzily and vaguely.
The last thing she felt before passing out was a thin, hard blade sliding between her ribs, and she could not tell if it was meant to kill her off, or save her life.
As I relate this story, fury builds in you.
Are you telling me that this filthy cow turd has killed me, stolen my body, and left me to take her place?
“I’m so sorry, child.”
