CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER THREE

Nestled in a pile cluttering the coffee table sat a discarded pouch of Lipton bleeding into the sunken oval of a porcelain saucer.

“It’s good, isn’t it?” Evangelical said. She lowered the mug into a nearby abyss, the porcelain finding the saucer and a watery pool of its own russet-hued blood with a gentle clank.

“It can fell armies,” Lucky heard herself saying.

And raise kings, came the remembered words from Madame Xuo’s red room.

The vengeful wraith of the woman with the white face and a slash of scarlet for lips waited opposite Lucky. From a small, low chair that had once sat in a distant past, she was near the window in the here and now, her eyes low, her tongue crawling with secrets and lies and things best left unsaid.

“I’m sorry?” Evangelical said.

Madame Xuo stared at Lucky, her knees not kneeling as they rested not on the grimy grey of a familiar carpet, but on ancient boards that were cracked, splintered and covered with dust. Nearby, Yin Ying stood too tall against the worn yellow of the wall, her breathing too loud as her wet lips broke into an eerie grin. She looked at the drops rolling down the window pane, then Evangelical, and then Lucky.

And her salvation sat, a stubborn remnant of her present refusing the determination of her ominous past. Evangelical leaned forward to take her tea from the low table between them, the warped wood holding two clay pots and two ceramic cups and small plates of roast duck, rice, fruit, small bites of candy.

Chinese funeral food.

Lucky paused and closed her eyes.

Outside, heavy clouds sobbed sheets of rain.

Inside, present relented to past, the room growing hot. A dragon snapped, slithered and snaked along the baseboards, the walls painted panels of red. Lucky on one side of the table, too young to die, the cup in her hands. Madame across from her, her knees not kneeling, her eyes downcast even as Lucky took her first sip.

The brew was bitter and thick, tasting of forgotten corners in high cupboards and a misplaced pride which knew neither embarrassment nor shame.

“It’s very old,” Yin Ying was saying, her back once again to the precarious heat of the brazier. “As old as China itself, they say. They also say it’s so powerful and rare it can fell armies and raise Kings.” She laughed, the sound viscid with slobber and bordering on cruel.

A second sip.

Did Madame’s lips twitch? Lucky wondered. Was there the hint of a smile poking at the corners?

Lucky’s face felt strange. She swallowed. Blinked her eyes. Found it odd that she felt heavy. Like stone. Empty stone. Like a corpse. One of those mummified Buddhists found hidden deep in a dark cave. The skin grey and shrunken, the skeleton still sitting as if waiting for coins to clink in his bowl. She was a husk. A husk that lived and breathed. That had skin that was warm to the touch with flesh that moved. Her cheeks, her nose, the edges of her eyes, everything, were she

this unfortunate

to see it in a mirror, it’d ripple like the waves

pulled deep

in Hangzhou Bay.

A third sip, Yin Ying gasping, Madame’s gaze still downcast.

She wanted to feel her face. Put her palms to her cheeks to feel the skin coming alive, snapping, slithering and snarling like the dragon riding the base of her cup. But she couldn’t. It wouldn’t be appropriate. She needed to be silent and discreet, her hands on her lap, her head bowed.

Her face was moving. The skin was alive, yes. Her fingers could feel it—for her palms had insisted on discovery despite decorum—but she didn’t know what it was. And her neck. The flesh there, too, was pulsing, pounding, wandering. Moving in ways it never had and simply could not and should not. She blinked, her vision growing dark.

She reached for the cup. A fourth sip.

“Madame,” Yin Ying said from the past.

“Are you okay?” Evangelical said in the present, her blonde hair too close, her forehead almost pressing against hers, Lucky’s fists clenched in hers. “Are you alright?”

“No,” Yin Ying said again. “No one’s ever had more than three.” The servant was weeping, sobbing, her shoulders shaking, the heels of her hands digging into her eyes. “Madame!”

Lucky was no longer in her body. She stood somewhere else, watching, wondering, curious. Afraid. She could see herself, too skinny and too scared and too close to dead as she took another sip. The cursed child at the end of a loveless, troubled life. She could see Yin Ying kneeling, panicked and afraid.

Of what? Lucky wondered.

Her hands were trapped. Evangelical still held them.

“The day I died . . . ” Lucky said.

Too young.

She stopped, the words leaving her, her voice sounding old, the young Lucky still suffering somewhere in a past that still lived.

Are you afraid?

She looked around and saw the unfamiliar. She was not home. Eidolon had never blazed with this kind of heat. The walls had never been this red and a dragon had never raced around this room in a blur of green and yellow and gold chasing a tail it could never catch.

The shadow stood behind Madame Xuo.

A sixth sip.

“Madame, please!” said Yin Ying to Madame Xuo the Still Silent, the words choked with tears. “She should have stopped at three.”

“I need only three,” Lucky said, her voice sounding distant.

“I’m sorry?” Evangelical released her hands. A cool palm was placed on Lucky’s forehead. The devout woman’s breath smelled of Ritz crackers and weak tea. We had Ritz in the house? Lucky found herself wondering, and then thought of the discarded pouch of Lipton weeping somewhere in a saucer.

“We need to talk,” Evangelical was saying, but the table still sat low and the room was still hot. And the Lucky living in the past still held her cup of tea, one sip, the seventh, remaining. She couldn’t feel her hands. She couldn’t feel her lips. The memory of these things, knowing where they were and how they were supposed to work, is what guided her now.

The shadow stood behind Madame who had yet to drink her tea. Madame who had yet to move. Madame whose eyes had yet to raise and blink.

Madame who had yet to see.

From where she stood, the Lucky who no longer kneeled, the one who stood in this all-seeing space, saw the flesh of the woman’s painted face had split and cracked. And the skin of those lips slashed red had peeled to dangle on her chin. A layer of dust lay like a thick blanket on the dark wig and the gold of the kimono had faded, the hem worn and frayed.

She could see the cobwebs covering Madame, the spiders crawling from the nose to skitter across the cheek and burrow into the ears. Their brethren poking from between her lips to scamper down her chin and into the gold of her kimono. Could see the hands that were not only paler than moonlight, but lacked life. The flesh on this body that should have seen a grave decades ago, yet still sat erect as if awaiting the clink of coin, had shrunk to the bone.

Madame was dead and this red room was the deep of her dark cave.

Glancing into her cup, Lucky saw her final sip. Felt the sudden breeze. A wind that was like the gentle sigh of something lonely and longing. A sigh that ruffled the cobwebs from Madame’s hair. That brought with it the scent of putrid dust and fetid flesh. That peeled flakes of dried skin from Madame that lifted and ducked and dove and swam through the air. That danced near the window and darted away from the rain and spiraled and swooped to land in Lucky’s Lipton.

No.

This ceramic was delicate and stained a shy brown, the brew ancient. If she looked hard enough into the thick liquid, she feared she’d see her own reflection, though she knew that would never be.

And although it wasn’t something she saw, whether she kneeled here, numb and dumb and almost blind, or stood, a tourist, separate and mute, she felt the shadow come closer. Leaving Madame, it came, abandoning the painted husk in an impatient rush, the gold of her kimono rustling.

And by the time Lucky had lifted her head, she knew.

“The day I died,” she said to a world of shadow and red and chasing dragons. She knew the window was still there and the ghosts still gathered in the rain on the avenue below. Knew this past which had lived could not live again despite the familiar ghost hissing from the corner.

Evangelical spoke, her voice slow, the unheard syllable muffled as if whispered from the depths of the darkest shadow waiting at the end of the longest hall.

Kneeling at the low table, Yin Ying near, head down and sobbing, she knew the shadow would wrap around her. Knew it would embrace her. Squeeze tight. Squeeze the breath from her. Squeeze until that final exhalation was released, reluctant and slow, into the air for Madame to catch, and inhale, and suck deep, deep, deep into her lungs and hold until, with a gasp, Xuo the No Longer Silent would lift her eyes, lift her lips in a smile, lift her head, and say,

“Drink, little Lucky.”

The final sip passed her lips. Her mouth numb, her tongue thick, she swallowed. Her last breath stolen as the world stuttered and stopped and lurched lopsided.

“The day I died,” Lucky felt herself say again.

“No,” Evangelical said. Lucky could smell her skin and feel her breath. Could almost see her and feel her. Found comfort in that.

In the past, Madame Xuo the Now Living Corpse rose to crawl over the table, smelling of dust and death and shrunken skin clinging to crumbling bone. “You’re not dead,” her salvation was saying.

From the past, Madame smiled, a slow baring of smeared red lips and yellowed teeth, as Evangelical pulled closer, her words tickling Lucky’s cheek.

“Not yet.”