The House of Life 3 Read online

  The House of Life

  Part III

  By Vann Chow

  Copyright © 2019 by Vann Chow

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  The Fishing Castle

  “Arrrrgghhh!!!” Chad screamed.

  “Help!!!!” He cried to the heartless Black Commissioner who was swishing and whooshing above him in the sky with a smirk on his face.

  The oddly dressed and groomed Chad had been discovered by a band of bloodthirst Mongolian warriors on horseback as soon as they landed on the wall of the Fishing Castle. In order not to raise any suspicion, Noqai decided to ‘kill him’ before the group could get close. He pierced him with the tip of a long stray spear he picked up on the way with a mock grunt and kept him skewered on it as he and his brother went over to greet the lingering souls of long-dead Mongolian comrades, ignoring his victim’s screeches, which were more out of fear than pain. As an out-of-body dreamer, Chad should not have felt a thing, nor would he bleed or die. It still sucked nonetheless. Chad felt like a piece of Char Siu meat being hung on the barbecue rack.

  But that was not the worst part. Because he couldn’t bleed, the naughty Black Commissioner had regurgitated all over him with dark red contents from his stomach that resembled blood from afar. The Mongol soldiers didn’t suspect a thing when their cold, piercing eyes fell on Chad on close quarters. Chad had never felt so humiliated in his life.

  “Soldiers, I have not seen you here before!” The leader of the group yelled across the field of dead Ming dynasty soldiers and civilians as their horses padded slowly towards the twins. Some of the dead Ming souls were floundering like fishes out of water from their rotten bodies, and were slashed and slain once more by the swords of the merciless invaders from the steppes as their horses trotted by.

  “We’re the sons of General Bayan! I’m Noqai and this is my brother Maide. We both serve the great Khan,” Noqai said proudly.

  The other man took note of the proud expressions on their faces, then at their elaborate armors and eventually their equally decorated stags. — The Black Commissioner had been given permission to use magic where appropriate, and he had turned Noqai’s eagle into a beautiful war horse. For the lack of better material, Maide had to make do with a slightly smaller one that used to be a pigeon. They stomped their feet on the ground impatiently, shaking their necks and hissing, unused to their current four-legged states.

  “What did the General send his sons here for?” The leader of the group was agitated and skeptical, but remained courteous in his speech, for General Bayan was one of their great Khan’s most trusted man. “We have been here for almost eight hundred years, fighting hard and doing our jobs without receiving a word from the north.”

  “That is precisely why we have come! The Great Khan is not satisfied with the progress of your siege! Why hasn’t the castle been captured after eight hundred years?” Noqai blared.

  According to history, the Siege of the Fishing Castle was long and tedious. The Mongolians failed sixteen times over thirty-six years in order to capture the city that would allow them to enter straight into the heartland of the Ming Kingdom. However, they succeeded the seventeenth time. Millions had died in the course. The dead Mongol warriors would not have known any of that, of course. If they were victorious, they would have gone in to pillage the city and drove their forces further east to the capital in to the heart of the country of the Ming people. These men wouldn’t have been killed here and be left to fight a losing, endless battle over and over again, their spirits too stubborn to leave earth even after their bodied wasted away.

  “We have come with an elite troop appointed by the Khan himself. Ten thousand men in all to help you finish the job!” Noqai stepped aside to reveal the parade of men behind him climbing up the mountain. The leader of the group and his men peered down and saw the magnificent illusion of a ten-thousand strong stomping hordes that Black Commissioner wanted them to see, mould with magic from a cloud of dark ashes and nothing more, and they were overjoyed, bolstered by the presence of reinforcement that took long enough to come.

  “Fearless warriors from the steppe, come join me!” Maide shouted and raised the sword in his hand towards the sky. “Let’s run this city down and make it the part of the Khan’s kingdom!” Then he turned and led the group through the broken gates into the city.

  The Silvers

  “There were too many of them! They are going to plug the way forward!” The watchman shouted atop his nest at the boatswain. The man sprinted into the gunner deck and related the urgent message to the Admiral.

  Admiral Henry was leaning over the ledge of the gun port where the muzzle of a canon would normally fit, looking out at the mammoth cloud of spirits they were about to slam into. He waved the man with the message off with one hand, as he saw all he needed to know. There was no knowing what would happen if the Imperieuse got swept up into the tornadoes of souls.

  “Have you sent out a distress signal to the Chongqing Celestial Regional Government?” The Admiral asked, steadying himself by grabbing the wooden beams on the swerving ship as he spoke.

  The First Mate hadn’t thought of that at all. For over a hundred years, they never had to ask for help from anyone. This was a first. “I’ll go tell the men to fire the flares immediately!” He scrambled deeper into the ship to find any idle men capable of the job.

  ***

  “Young master! I think I have found them!” The cook shouted over the racket in the hull and above.

  Michael, and all the others, stopped what he was doing and stomped over to where the cook was and followed his gaze down at a cluster of light brown wooden chests. Over their locks, as he expected were the crossed iconic yellow-paper seals from the Qing Government.

  “Cherry wood, not bad,” Michael smirked. When he saw the perplexed look on Ian’s face, he explained himself. “Cherry wood is nature’s natural evil-spirits repellent. Only the living, and immortals like myself, could touch it without being harmed. That was how the chests have been kept untouched by the vile and money-hungry crews onboard.”

  “But how did it get in here in the first place?” The cook asked. He was not the sharpest tool in the shed.

  “Admiral Henry has been colluding with someone powerful, maybe a corrupted Celestial official, an immortal.”

  “Or an elevator spirits, like Zhizu,” Michael said. He then bent down, peeled one of the seal papers off the chest, and held it up to the blue light emitting from the fingertips of his other hands.

  “What language is that?” The words on the paper was not Chinese, although written with the same level of strength, resilience and calligraphy flare that only a Chinese ink brush could allow.

  “These are Manchurian script,” Michael explained to his British friend. “Unfortunately I’m too young to have a chance to learn to read them, and same for the others.” He looked around to see if any of his men objected to what he said. “Guess we’ll just have to take them back with us and have Black and White Commissioners decipher them.”

  Most of the servants, workmen and soldiers in the Chamber of Life and Nutrition and the Hong Kong celestial courts were paper-mache creatures donated by kind-hearted people who burnt paper dolls as offering to the dead Master at his funeral and annual memorial services. Like Jade, they were breathed with life by magic. None of them were older than fifty years old, and the Qing Empire had collapsed in 1911. Since then, no Chinese was forced
to learn the language of the Manchurians anymore.

  “Who are you?!” A voice shouted from the threshold of the cargo bay. “What are you doing here?”

  “Ha!” Michael said, “they have finally noticed us!”

  “What’s the plan now?”

  Michael said with a wry smile to his men. “The plan is we hold them off as long as we have to, until…”

  “Until what?” Ian asked, but Michael was unable to finish his sentence as he was being knocked to the wall of crates behind him by the wooden leg stump one of the sailor had hurled at him.

  “None of you will get out of here alive!” The man hopped over angrily in a usual speed for someone without a leg, but Ian quickly realized that as ghosts, they didn’t need both legs to walk.

  “Everyone stand close to the cherry wood chests! They could protect us!” Michael shouted and spun around to rearrange the chests into a small fortress.

  The useful advices made the attackers realize that they have to act fast, before the intruders could tuck themselves between the damned cherry wood that would scathe their skins should they touch them. One of the sailors, his clothes ripped on multiple places, showing huge untended, open wounds on his chests and backs that still got bits of chipped woods stuck in them, likely injuries from an ancient blast a hundred years ago, grabbed Ian by the arm. Another sailor, one without the top of his brain and its content threatening to spill out had wrapped his arms around the carpenter. Visible paper crests could be seen around his bodies as he struggled to keep himself inflated.

  The one-legged sailor picked up his wooden stump and hurled it across at the cook who was closest to Michael and he got hit fair and square on his head. A whiff of smoke escaped from a hole in his collapsed paper head and he fell to the ground in an instance, dead. Ian could see that he was nothing but a shell now. His inside was completely hollowed. The cabin boy saw everything and creamed and ran towards the exit, only to be cut in half on the waists like a Russian doll by a sailor with a long blade.

  “Arrghhh!!” A chest flew across the bay at the cruel sailor and knocked him flat. When it hit the ground, it bursts and its wooden panels broke apart. Splinters of cherry wood exploded everywhere in the room and cut Ian on the face. But he did not have it as bad as the British sailors. They screeched as the splinters dug into their skins and melted pieces of their bodies off into nothing but flying ashes.

  White silver ingots tumbled out of the exploded box and landed all over the sailor who was knocked to the ground. The man gave off the loudest cry of pain amongst all. The silver ingots seem to be burning him alive.

  Ian turned to look at the man who hurled the chest over and saw that it was of course none other than Skinny Bones. He was the only one with such strength. Ian smiled at him, and the sailor who was holding him decided to wring the smile out of his face by putting his hands on his neck.

  “Help!” Ian let out a weak cry, choking under the pressure of the man’s hand.

  Despite the pain, the sailor on the ground with the knife managed to flick the silvers off his body and stood up on his feet. Before Skinny Bones could ran over to extract Ian from his evil attacker’s hands, he was pelted by a rain of silver ingots that the angered sailor had figured out a way to lift and catapult at him with the blade of his knife without touching them. Turned out Skinny Bones was just as susceptible to silver as the rouge sailors, being a ghost himself.

  Michael did not approve of his throwing and breaking one of the chests, but he hadn’t the time to show his disapproval. Another sailor had lounged at him, and that one had a hack saw. The hack saw looked familiar. It had belonged to his carpenter, who was now nothing but a heap of ripped papers lying two feet away. All three of his paper mache men from the Big Eye Fish had died. He let out a sigh as he jumped around and fended off the blows by the man without the top of his skull.

  “Help!” Ian yelped, trying to pry the fingers of his attackers off his neck in vain. He tried to lift his knee and attempted to kick the man on his groins, thinking that it would surely help, but he found out that the man, floating, had almost no lower body.

  “Don’t let him kill you!” Michael shouted.

  “Ya, howww?!” Ian begged for an answer in a squealy voice he never thought he could make. It was kind of hard to not let someone kill you when they were killing you, he thought.

  “You’re not a spirit, you’re of a different class! A dreamer. He can’t hurt you, unless you let him!”

  A stray ingot that was aimed for Skinny Bones flew at his face. He closed his eyes instinctively just before it hit, but it noting happened to him at all, it penetrated him and fell on to the floor behind him with a thud. When he reopened his eyes, he finally understood what Michael was saying, despite how convoluted everything seemed. — Unlike the others, he was not a ghost, nor was he physically there. In fact, he was not even metaphysically there. He didn’t know in what ways he existed at the moment, but he surely couldn’t be choked if he was immaterial. And as soon as that thought appeared in his head, the hands of the sailors went through his neck and clasped together as if he was made out of air.

  “Ah ha!” He pulled himself away from his captor triumphantly and laughed, exhilarated. He could hardly contain his excitement. Quickly, he grabbed the ingots sprayed on the floor and threw them in a mad frenzy at his opponent. The man scrambled out of the door and ran out for help. Ian quickly ran over to Skinny Bones and covered him with his indestructible body. They ran across the hall and ducked into the gap between boxes of cherry wood chests. Michael was the only one now exposed, against the group of irritated sailors. Ian wanted to came out from hiding to help him, but Skinny Bones pulled him back.

  “What?!” He blared at the man. “I’m not a coward!”

  “Look at yourself!” Skinny Bones stared at his arms. They were turning semi-transparent and had obtained a strange shade of bluish green, it was as if he was becoming a piece of glass. Even his fingers felt slightly more rigid than they were before.

  “What’s happening to me?”

  “You’re becoming self-aware, aware of the fact that you don’t belong here but also don’t know where else to go is not good for you.”

  “What do you mean I don’t know where else to go? I could always just wake up back at home, can’t I?” He said, holding up his hands in the dimly lit space. The skinny man didn’t answer him, because he had never seen any out-of-body dreamers ever gone home. Outside, Michael was leaping about fighting off the unrelenting sailors.

  Suddenly, there was a quick succession of ear-splitting bangs, followed by another series, followed by yet another series. The whole ship shuddered and the wall of the hull groaned.

  “The guns!” Skinny Bones commented. “They had fired!”

  “At whom?!” Ian asked.

  “The souls from the Fishing City. Our plan’s working!” Michael exclaimed.

  “What’s going on up there?!” The sailor with the knife asked, who shook his head and looked up, only to see ancient dusts felling on top of their heads as the ship shuddered at another rounds of gunfire.

  “I’ll go up and look!” The skull-less one suggested, annoyed at the lack of progress here with the intruders.

  “No, let me!” The one-legged one flew in front of his companion and blocked his way out.

  “Why don’t all three of you go together?!” Standing on top of the chests, Michael said with a raise eyebrow. Annoyed, they gave him nasty looks and chased each other out of the hold.

  Standing from his vantage point, he spotted the fishing nets and some strayed ropes, and he leaped over to hoist them up.

  “Quickly, help me throw all of the chests into the net!” He was more talking to Skinny Bones than to Ian, who felt weaker and stiffer by the minute.

  “Don’t worry,” Michael said to Ian. “Concentrate on being here, focus your mind. Your strength will return!”

  What Michael suggested was easier said than done, because the more Ian concentrated on ‘being her
e’, the more he realized that he wasn’t actually there. Self-awareness was a curse, he now realized. It was as if he was Adam in the Book of Genesis, made aware for the first time that he was naked after having eaten the forbidden fruit. “What’s going to happen to me if this continues?” He tried to lift up a chest, but found that the muscles in his fingers could no longer flex and he was unable make a grip.

  “Your spirit will be crystalized, and be trapped forever inside.” Michael said matter-of-factly, as if it was the most ordinary of things, as he bounced about the crates. “Those spiritual crystals that people buy and put in their homes as decorations, that was what you’d become.”

  A chill ran down Ian’s spine. The feeling of dread overcame him and he stood frozen, unable to move.

  The Wait

  Guns were fired as often as they could, but the cloud of dead spirits hardly broke. These spirits, the quartermaster had now found out from a dusty annual he never bothered to read for the last hundred years, were casualties of a long, arduous battles between Mongolian invaders and the Ming army at the city of the Fishing Castle in the 13th century. Sitting by the bank of the Yangtze, the Fishing Castle was the gateway to the inner plains of the Central Kingdom. For whatever reason, the millions of dead souls were stirred to a great unrest.

  “It’s been eight hundred years, and the incompetent Chinese Celestial Court has yet to reap all the dead souls in the area!” He shouted over the thunders of the canon shots at the Admiral about his findings.

  “This is ridiculous!” Admiral Henry was completely beside himself. He had never seen anything like that. Presently, the men the First Mate had sent to find the flares were scrambling up the stairs in fright.

  “What’s the matter?!”

  “The captain of the Hong Kong ship had boarded our ship!” The one-legged man crawled to the Admiral’s feet with his head down. “They have found the crates!”