Page 92 of The Girl with a Thousand Faces
Two hours later, and the ship is in chaos.
It has mysteriously run aground in Victoria Harbor, crashing into another docked military vessel. The resulting damage has pierced both hulls, causing the lower levels to flood with water. If that weren’t enough, a fire has broken out on board. Men are dead, the survivors fighting among themselves.
You take full advantage of the confusion you’ve caused.
Wrecking the ship was your main goal. That enemy soldiers will also die is a nice bonus. The irony of the Japanese being so meticulous in warding against spirits is that the men who die aboard won’t come back as undead. That means you are the only spirit anyone has to worry about, and you are not on their side.
You limp through flooded corridors, still wearing Goro’s body. His flesh has accrued a few stab wounds and a couple of bullets, and it stings like hell. You can mostly shut it off, though. There is something quite freeing in knowing that a body doesn’t belong to you.
The plotting room is occupied by only two men, both junior engineers. There would normally be more but things are a little hectic at the moment. One runs off in fright when you wave a gun; the other starts yelling. You shoot him dead, and lock yourself in.
Switches flip beneath your hands. Lights beep and blink. Somewhere up above, whatever remains of the warship’s artillery will be firing at surrounding vessels, blindly. If it goes on long enough, other ships will eventually return fire, just to sink this one.
Fine by you.
Someone begins yelling and banging on the door. A part of you wants to let them in, kill them with your own hands, feel them clinging to you as they seek comfort in death. Even from a murderer.
But everything in you that is sensible, and reasonable—a hard balance to maintain, as a ghost—reminds you that victory is the goal. If you open this door, someone might be able to reverse your sabotage.
So you sit, and wait. Put your borrowed feet up on the desk, hands behind your head.
Shots rock the warship. Return fire, at last. Maybe they evacuated the men on board, maybe not. Enough have died, either way. You no longer hear anyone banging on the door of this room, and that’s promising.
Creaking noises; is this ship about to sink? Also hopeful. You open the door,finally. Water pours into your room, and you welcome it. Water is pain, but a familiar one. Everyone still aboard will drown as you have drowned.
And really, that’s the heart of it all, isn’t it? You want everyone to know your pain as you do. Especially those who are responsible for it.
The man who was banging on the door is still there, to your surprise. It’s the first junior engineer, the one who initially ran off; his courage must have sent him crawling back, keeping him firm even as everything is going to hell.
His gun is empty so he attacks you futilely with his fists. You ignore him, mildly intrigued by the way his knuckles leave marks on your ribs, and the meaty places of your body. When that has no effect other than to make you bruised and bleeding, he tries to strangle you with his bare hands.
You let him, out of morbid curiosity, because strangulation isn’t something you’ve experienced yet. It’s not very nice, and you decide not to experience it again.
Afterward, he sits there sobbing and shaking while the water rises around him, your freshly throttled corpse floating nearby. The water is almost waist-deep, and still pouring in.
Feeling bored, you slip free from Goro’s ruined shell.
The junior engineer sees you ooze out, a green-hued spirit girl, and screams horribly loud in that small, enclosed space. Your form reasserts itself to the alluring, ethereal water ghost that death has shaped your soul into. His screaming stops as the glamour takes hold; you recognize the familiar look of awestruck entrancement in his gaze.
“Beautiful,” he whispers, in Japanese. You’ve learned a lot of that language, these past three years.
My turn, you think, and close your fingers around his soft, soft throat as you push his head beneath the swirling water.
In wars, the presence of ghosts is factored into calculations: for roughly every thousand men killed in battle, generals assume that at least one of them will return as a spiritual force, angry about their death and in need of dispersing by exorcists or appeasing through offerings. Hence the Japanese and their careful warding of the Walled City, their efforts to corral angry spirits.
Sometimes, ghosts will even fight for one side or another. They may or may not appear right away; they may be stronger or weaker when they do appear, depending on the time of year, and how much of their spirit has endured. Some can throw punches and fire weapons, while others drift past in a hazy cloud.
This sort of thing is not new, though textbooks prefer not to discuss it. The American Civil War was a short-lived affair, thanks to the legions of furious ghosts who had suffered so abominably as abused, enslaved people while alive, and fought against the South.
George Washington frequently sought counsel from his two dead sisters, lost to childhood illness; their foresight gave him an edge.
The witch hunts of the 1600s ended abruptly when the ghosts of murdered women began slaughtering witch-finders.
King Henry VIII was eventually found dead under mysterious circumstances, the artifacts of his many queens lying scattered across his body.
And poor Puyi, China’s unlucky last emperor, was frequently plagued by bad luck—arising, many said, from the haunting of the previous empress’s displeased spirit. She always considered him inadequate to fill her shoes.
It is notable, too, that most of these ghosts were women or members of the underclasses. That should surprise no one. Those who lack power in life carry an unequal share of injustice into death. Returning from the grave is their only recourse to right those wrongs.
