The Geomancer's Compass (15 page)

When we were out of earshot, I poked Brian hard in the arm. “Why do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“You know what I mean. Talk to people like that.”

“Like what?”

“Homeless people.”

“He had a dog. I had a doggy bag.”

“You would have talked to him anyway, even without the dog and the doggy bag. It's embarrassing.”

“Not to me.”

“It is to me.”

“You'll just have to get over it, won't you?” He stopped walking and turned to face me. “Either that or – I know, Randi, maybe all the homeless people could go live in the tunnels, so that decent hardworking Canadians like you and me wouldn't have to see them.”

My face flushed. Defiantly I handed him an antibacterial wipe. He had me; we both knew it. He made a show of wadding up the wipe, unused, and dunking it basketball-style into a nearby trash can. “C'mon, Little Miss Bigot.”

And suddenly there it was: rearing up from the broken sidewalk, a two-story, wood-frame, pagoda-style building with an upward-turning hipped tile roof, boarded-up lattice windows, and a moon-shaped door leading to a second-story balcony the width of the building. Definitely Chinese-looking, unmistakably so. Svetlana had been right on that count.

I pointed to the sign over the store's heavy wooden double door, studded and outfitted with elaborate, corroded lion-head pulls. A hundred-plus Saskatchewan winters had faded the letters until they were no more than a glimmer of paint on bleached wood. Still, I could just make out the words:
Azure Dragon Tea and Herb Sanatorium
. “This is it,” I
said. I stepped forward, intending to try the door or peek through one of the boarded-up windows.

That's when I felt it – the cold. You know how, sometimes when you're swimming, you come across a current of water much colder than the surrounding water? Or maybe you dive down really deep and hit this zone of super-frigid water? It was like that: a discernible sudden drop in temperature depending on where you were standing relative to the store. Hastily I retreated back into the warmth of the August afternoon. By comparison, it felt almost sweltering. What's up with this? I wondered. If I'd known it was going to be cold, I'd have brought my new hoodie with the cool CanBoard logo. My second thought was a more sobering one:
Why? Why
is it perfectly warm here on the sidewalk and, not a yard away, freezing cold? It made no sense. I hugged myself and eyed the building with suspicion. There was something creepy about it, something I couldn't put my finger on. I was getting weird vibes from it. I know that sounds crazy, but I was. Usually abandoned buildings are like blown husks, all dried up, empty-feeling, but this one didn't seem empty. It seemed full. Full of what? I felt this little flutter in my gut that I recognized as the beginning of a panic attack. Because, yes, I do have panic attacks. Not very often, but sometimes, and they are really annoying and the last thing I needed at the moment, which meant
I had to calm down
. Breathe, I told myself, breathe. Slowly, evenly.

In the meantime Brian was consulting his watch. “Five o'clock on the dot. Were we supposed to meet The Grandfather outside the store or in?”

“He didn't say. Outside, I guess. Presumably it's locked. Brian, listen …”

Brian removed the key A-Ma had given me from his pocket and waggled it at me. “The first locked door we encounter?”

Of course! Why hadn't I thought of that? What other building in Moose Jaw would A-Ma have been likely to have a key for?

“Let's see if it fits,” he said.

Again the flutter, stronger this time, more urgent, accompanied by a tightness in my chest. Not good, but I could get a handle on it. “OK but, if it does, don't turn it.” I didn't say this so much as squeak it.

“Why not?”

“Just don't, Brian. I have a bad feeling.” I hugged myself and rocked back and forth on my heels in an attempt to soothe my nerves. Calm down, it's just a building.
No it isn't
. Yes it is.

“A bad feeling? Hmmm. That's totally rational.” Brian walked over to the door and slid the key into its keyhole. “What do you know?” he called over his shoulder. “It fits.” Then, “Cripes, why's it so cold?”

“I don't know,” I said miserably. “It's like there's some
weird kind of perimeter or something around the building, a sort of cold zone.”

“Cold zone?” he scoffed. “Probably somebody left the air conditioner on.”

“Don't be an idiot,” I snapped. “They didn't have air conditioning back then.”

Brian considered this for a minute. “I once saw this show where ghost hunters used infrared thermometers to detect cold spots in places that were supposed to be haunted. The cold spots indicated paranormal activity.”

“Brian! Could we not talk about this?”

Then he did it: he started to turn the key. He knew I was freaking out and he just couldn't resist nudging me a little closer to the edge. “
Stop!
” I practically shrieked, before clapping my hand over my mouth and looking quickly to see if anybody had heard me. Luckily the cold zone around the haunted store turned out to be not much of a hub of activity. The homeless guy and his dog were the only sentient beings in sight, and even they were out of earshot.

Brian's face exploded into a grin. “Randi! Don't tell me you're
scared
? Scared of a
ghost
?”

“Don't you dare tease me, Brian Liu!” I protested. “Of course I'm scared. It's irrational, I know, but I can't help it.”

His grin widened. “But I thought you didn't believe in ghosts?”

“I don't. But I'm still scared of them.”

“You can't be scared of something you don't believe in. That's just silly.” He turned back to the door.

“Get away from there!” I grabbed onto his vest and tried to drag him away, but without much success. He's big and I'm not, so it boiled down to me yanking at his vest and pummeling him on the back and trying to grab the key, while he laughed and held the key up over his head where I couldn't reach it. The good news was that this tussle served to distract me and keep me from panicking.

“A-Ma gave us the key for a reason, not so we would never use it,” he argued.

“She gave me the key, not you.”

“And you gave it to me because I'm a Man of Action, and you're a scared little girly-girl.”

“I am not.”

“Yes, you are. Girly-girl.”

“Please, Brian. Can't we just wait until The Grandfather gets here?”

“But what if The Grandfather's inside?”

“He's not inside. I'm sure of it. That's not the way this thing works.” The truth was, I didn't know
how
“this thing” worked, but I must have been figuring it out at some level because what I said next made sense to me. “He needs us to log onto the
feng shui
network and do a search for him.”

Brian looked skeptical. “Isn't he just going to appear? The way he did on the tour?”

I shook my head. “No, I don't think so. If we're not in a virtual space, he can't get to us. He needs to be … summoned.”

“So summon him.”

I considered this for moment. “I'll log on using my Zypad, and we can split the signal and have it go wirelessly to our I-spex. That way we'll have a virtual environment to interact in.”

“OK, brainiac,” Brian conceded. “Give it a go.”

“F
irst we've got to find him.” I crossed to the curb and sat down on it, with my back to the store. Brian hunkered down behind me, looking at the screen over my shoulder. I logged on, entering through the New Age portal and selecting the
feng shui
network. Then I did a control-find for “Charlie Liu.” Up came a question: “Do you mean Liu Xiazong?” The Grandfather's Chinese name. Affirmative – I clicked on it.

The avatar wavered into view on the screen, green globe luminous. “Yes!” I removed my I-spex from the knapsack and swiped them with my CanBoard card. “Now yours,” I instructed Brian, who fished his set from one of his vest pockets and handed them to me. “I charged them fully before I left Calgary,” I said. “They should be good for hours.” I swiped his I-spex and handed them back to him, then
swiped the Zypad to establish the connection. I took a breath to compose myself and turned to Brian. “Ready to rock?”

“I'm always ready to rock. I'm not the girly-girl.”

“Shut up if you know what's good for you.”

“I'm not the one who's scared of ghosts.”

I stuck my tongue out at him, put my I-spex on, and powered on. So did he.

Because we were not actually entering the virtual environment, but only calling up the virtual presence of a simply delineated avatar, the entry bump was much less jarring than it had been for the Below Gold Mountain tour. Still, there was that sense of dislocation and elongation, as if we had suddenly shot up several inches in height, as if the ground were that much farther down. I glanced down at the screen of my Zypad. The avatar had vanished. For a moment I panicked. Then –

“Shall we?” The voice came from behind us. We twisted around to see the avatar hovering in front of the big double door. In daylight it looked sketchier than it had in the virtual tour of the
lo p'an
or during the Below Gold Mountain tour. Now it was little more than a line drawing, almost cartoonish, in luminescent green ink. It was nevertheless 3-D, thanks to the I-spex's stereoscopic capacity, which gives the illusion of depth to a computer-generated image. Not a bad job.

“My first business venture,” the avatar said. It gestured toward the store, its voice heavy with regret. “At the time, it
seemed unbelievably grand. We lived on the top floor, above the shop. I can't tell you how hard it was for me to give it up, all that we had achieved, what we had sacrificed so much for. My brother and I were of humble origins, yet we rose from the tunnels to build this business from the ground up. With considerable opposition from our white neighbors, I might add.” It sighed and shook its head. “But Qianfu's ghost would not allow us to rest. Not here. Not anywhere. I haven't set foot inside this store since I moved the family to Vancouver, and that was a very long time ago.”

“Why is it so cold?” Brian asked.

“Probably a leak from the store. Buildings of that era were not so well insulated as they are now, and there's no place colder than the haunt of a hungry ghost.” Brian gave me a look that said, “See, I told you.” The avatar continued. “Now, children, before we go in, we must have a little chat.”

“A little chat?” Brian repeated.

“A little chat,” the avatar confirmed. “I need to prepare you for what you are about to experience. It will likely be … frightening.”

“How frightening?” I asked. Could I be more frightened than I was now? Yes, I could. Not a reassuring thought.

The Grandfather turned to me. “You, Miranda, will be very frightened. Brian a little less so.”

“Why?” I demanded. “Because I'm a girl? That is so sexist.”

“No,” replied the avatar. “Girls can be just as brave as boys
and boys can be just as frightened as girls. You will be more frightened because you are anxious by disposition. Brian is more sanguine; the world does not scare him so much.”

“The world doesn't scare me,” I insisted.

The other two exchanged glances.

“What?” I demanded.

“Germs and microbes?” the avatar asked.

“How about Ebola fever?” teased Brian. “What about bugs that live in your mattress and are so small that you can't see them without a microscope?”

The Grandfather chuckled. “As I recall, musical chairs scared you.” We'd played the game at Aubrey's eighth birthday party and when I had lost my chair, I'd freaked out. Big deal – I was five, and it was totally nerve-racking. You would have screamed your head off too.

“To be fair, Miranda, you are not wrong to be frightened,” said The Grandfather. “The truth is that hungry ghosts are far from harmless.”

“But they can't actually hurt you, can they?” Brian asked. “I mean, ghosts aren't real. Not in the same way that we're real.”

“They are not part of your reality, in the same way that I am not part of your reality,” the avatar explained, “but they are no less real than I am, and no more imaginary than you.”

“OK,” said Brian, “back up. You lost me.”

The avatar sighed. “You and I, Brian, exist in the human realm, which is based on passion, desire, and doubt. Qianfu
exists in the hungry ghost realm, a kind of hell stoked by the flames of insatiable desire. You summon me into your reality by means of VR; a hungry ghost invades your reality through the extremity of its unsatisfied, all-consuming hunger and thirst, its dire and unslakable need. As for what it can do, it can frighten you to the point of madness or, indeed, to the point of death.”