Page 97 of The Girl with a Thousand Faces
The exorcism is excruciating, all the more because you are strong. It takes two attempts before they can force you from the corpse you’ve hidden in. When you finally crawl forth, trembling and wishing that water ghosts could cry, the sun is beginning to sink behind the hills.
Small mercies: between the cooling off of late afternoon and the shade offered by this valley, you do not die right away.
Thankfully, the Catholic priests do not seem to recognize how deadly the sunlight is. You are a different kind of ghost than anything they’ve seen in the West, and when their third exorcism fails to disperse your withering spirit, they decide to bind you, instead.
You’ll wonder, later, if the Taoist priests knew and said nothing. Perhaps they were young and ignorant of water ghosts, or perhaps they felt disinclined to assist their Catholic cousins in dispersal and exorcism. You are not a normal ghost, after all, and have made a name for yourself during these war years. Anyone with a conscience would feel the weight of guilt.
Right now, you do not have space to consider this, and know only searing anger, wrenching betrayal. Even at Wing Yun, who unwittingly led them straight to you. His promises feel hollow in that moment, like everything else.
As the ritual reaches its climax, one of the Taoist priests steps forward with a large bottle gourd, elegantly painted and etched all over with glyphs. A fine, thin net stretches around it, shimmering slightly.
You know what’s coming. Bottle gourds have a long history of uses, from medicines to spirit-trapping. They’re not easy to make for one as powerful as you, but these men have come prepared, and are clearly willing to spend the resources.
Their chants rise louder, Latin and Chinese entwining in awful disharmony. Weakened, sun-frazzled, exhausted, and in pain, you begin to turn into mist. And that mist flows into the bottle gourd, like a genie in reverse.
Your last thought before darkness clamps down is that, if you ever get out of here, you willneverforgive this city.
30A MUTUAL PROPOSITION
One year ago…
Death is final, so we fear it. Even if a spirit reincarnates to a new life, that is no comfort to the self that is lost, or the possibilities that went with it. A fresh start is no guarantee, either, of a better experience.
But there are worse things than death. Your torment was one such thing.
Time doesn’t freeze for the being caught in a bottle gourd. The experience is not like falling asleep or slipping into a coma, where unconsciousness is a gift to protect the mind. Humans either don’t realize that, or don’t care, when they trap spirits within.
You are aware and awake in that gourd, for every excruciating moment. Pinioned in pitch blackness with nothing to see or hear, no one to speak to but your own thoughts. In Chinese and Christian hells, there are at least other people to share the misery. Demons to bargain with, gods to plead with.
This is simply nothingness. Pure isolation and loneliness, distilled.
No wonder ghosts and demons who are bound always come out so angry.
You’re not immune to the strain, and periodically lose your mind. Minutes and hours and days and weeks and months andyearsof screaming, singing, crying, pleading in the empty dark. Insanity descends on you like a flood, and then recedes in time as your spirit mind cycles through suffering and healing and yet more suffering.
It is an unimaginable experience, and I am sorry for any sentient being—living or dead, human or demon—who must endure that.
A lesser ghost would have fragmented. Many of the other captured ghosts do just that: quietly expiring within those gourds, which themselves are locked away in a secure storage room in a well-guarded basement facility. Their souls cannot even reincarnate, and they are nothing more than bottles of discombobulated energy.
But you, who have always been fierce and focused, overflowing with energy and now newly warped by multiple betrayals all feeding your hate… You, you persevere. The little girl who couldn’t stop moving, who jittered restlessly, is now the not-so-little ghost who still can’t let go, relax, disperse. What’s left of your soul is too restless.
Even knowing it is futile and that you might easily spend a hundred years, or indeed forever, in this stupid fucking fruit husk, you refuse to collapse into nothing. Because the alternative is that there can never be justice for the things done to you; no resolution, no vengeance. That is more unbearable than any death or torment.
No one else will ever know this struggle you faced, this great unheralded battle in your life. But for what it’s worth, Siu Yin, this goddess saw you, and was impressed.
You had almost made peace with such inconceivable torment, when fate again intervened.
Dates and hours are hard to quantify in a dark place with no functioning senses, no companionship or presence. All you know is that the suffering and madness has gone on interminably, until it suddenly stops.
There comes a ring of brightness, forming around. It is the first light you have seen in what feels like eons, easing the unending and unresponsive darkness. That frightens you, makes you worry that death is at hand. Nothing you can do about it except brace.
Then a spiraling sensation, as if you are being drawn upward through a drain, in reverse. Corporeal reality slams down with the force of a truck smashing into a concrete cliff. The world reasserts itself.
Floor.You are lying on the floor, cheek pressed to chilly concrete. There is pain, all over; it is too dry in here. For a moment, the sheer overwhelm of existing in any capacity is too much, and your mind can’t take it. After so long existing in nothingness, this small enclosed space is a vast, sensory-laden expanse.
Try to scream, find you can’t breathe. As usual. The familiar drenched feeling in your dead lungs. Look down; clawed, green-tinged hands. A bony and monstrous form. Yourself as you are, in ghost form.
That’s bad. It is too dry in here, no water anywhere. Already, your spirit skin is cracking. The room itself is a small stone cell, eight feet by eight feet. No furniture, only a single pedestal on which to rest the gourd. Fu talismans hang from the walls, and a ring of salt surrounds the pedestal. The talismans are rent, but the salt circle is intact.
