The Geomancer's Compass (5 page)

A
flash of memory briefly lit up some distant corner of my brain as my mind jogged violently back in time – something locked away in RAM having to do with The Grandfather's funeral. “Is this about … the curse?” I asked.

She nodded.

“You think our family's cursed?”

“I know it is.”

I sat back on my heels. “Well, in the first place, it isn't. That's just crazy. And, even if it was true, what would you expect me to do about it?”

“You must lift the curse,” she replied. “That's your mission.”

“Lift it? How?” I was beginning to feel kind of panicky. I didn't have time for some bogus mission. I had places to go, people to see. Well, not people to see, but metalanguages to
write. “I'm a minor. Surely you've got to be a grown-up before you're allowed to go around lifting curses.”

“This is serious, Miranda.”

“No it's not. Not really. We may be a little dysfunctional –”

“Miranda!” she snapped. “Don't patronize me. And we are
not
dysfunctional. Families on sitcoms are dysfunctional. We are
doomed
.” It was the first time she had ever raised her voice to me. I was so shocked I couldn't say a word. I just sat there, my bum on my heels, staring at her with my mouth hanging open. “Look,” she continued, “I'm not the only one dying here. Our entire
family
is dying. All this illness … these accidents … you have to listen to me and do what I say. I haven't much time and, frankly, neither have you.”

This took me aback. “What?”

“How long do you think it will be before something happens to you as well?” she demanded. “Some sort of cancer, or you just accidentally
happen
to fall down an elevator shaft?”

“
Excuse me?
”

She leaned forward in her chair and, reaching out, took my chin in her hand and stared deeply into my eyes. “I'm saying that you're the only Liu who has yet to be struck down. Do you think that's not going to happen? Why should you be spared?” She squeezed my chin, released it, and settled back in her chair, closing her eyes. This burst of activity, brief as it was, had clearly worn her out.

“I don't think about it, OK?” I stood. “It doesn't occur to me to worry about random things I can't control. That's being obsessive. That's being
crazy
.”

She sighed and shook her head without opening her eyes. “I agree, Miranda. It is crazy. It's also true.” She waved her hand in the air. “Oh, for heaven's sake, Miranda, will you just sit down and stop trying to talk me out of what I know, and let me explain?”

I shuffled over to the other chair and sat. I replaced the box containing the compass on the side table. “OK,” I said. “Shoot.”

A-Ma cleared her throat. “The reason why The Grandfather lived as long as he did was that he was waiting for you to grow up.”

I shifted uncomfortably in the chair. “Me? Why me?”

“So that you could help him find a body.”

“A body?”

“Well, more like bones.”

“
Bones?
”

She nodded.

“What?” I asked. “Were they lost?”

“Terribly, tragically lost,” she replied. “Unfortunately, The Grandfather choked on that moon cake before you were ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“To help him,” she said. “He knew that he would need
your technical skills if he was ever to find the body of Qianfu and lift the curse.”

I held up my hand. “Hold on a minute. Who's Qianfu?”

“Qianfu was The Grandfather's twin brother,” she replied. “He was beaten to death in the CPR rail yard in Moose Jaw in 1908.”

Why had I never heard about this? “Wow. That's rough. Why?”

“It was passed off as a hate crime – there was a great deal of prejudice against the Chinese at that time, fear on the part of white men that the Chinese were taking their jobs. But that wasn't the real reason Qianfu was killed. It was because of Violet McNabb, a young woman who worked as a waitress in Wong's Chinese Restaurant. A
white
woman.”

“And?”

“They fell in love.”

“And that was such a crime?”

A-Ma smiled wearily. “At that time and in that place such a liaison was more than a crime, Miranda. It was … unspeakable, even unthinkable. It could be neither countenanced, nor forgiven. And he paid for it with his life.”

“What happened to Violet?”

A-Ma dismissed my question with another wave of her hand. “Violet is beside the point. I think she married some pig farmer.”

I whistled. “That's cruel and unusual punishment. Have you ever smelled a pig farm?”

“There's more to this than just a story of star-crossed lovers,” A-Ma warned me. “Our family buried Qianfu, and after seven years his body was dug up and taken to the local Death House …”

I blinked. “The
what
?”

“The Death House,” she replied matter-of-factly. “Where the bones of the deceased were scraped and whatever flesh remained on them was burned so that they could be returned to China and buried in our family graveyard in Zhongshan.”

I shivered. “That's seriously creepy.”

She shrugged. “It was the usual practice back then. Nobody wanted to be buried in a barbaric outback like Canada.” I must have looked sort of green because she added, “What? Pumping corpses full of formaldehyde so they'll be preserved for perpetuity isn't creepy?”

“It's the creepy we know,” I pointed out. “Go on.”

“One cold winter night, the Death House caught on fire. When the firemen finally succeeded in putting out the flames, they discovered Qianfu's body. What was left of it, at any rate.”

“And …”

“Moose Jaw went berserk,” said A-Ma. “It hadn't been widely known that we twice-buried our dead. When white people found out, they exploded in outrage and horror. The local newspapers were full of it, riling up people, fanning the flames of hatred, of racism. Do you know how the editor of one of the local newspapers described the Chinese community?
As ‘half-human, half-devil, rat-eating, rag-wearing, law-ignoring, Christian-civilization-hating, opium-smoking, labor-degrading, entrails-sucking celestials.' That's how.”

I reflected on this for a moment. “ ‘Entrails-sucking'? Really?”

She smiled faintly. “You can't make this stuff up. That was a bad time to be Chinese in Canada, Miranda. A very bad time. In any case, Alfred Humes, the town's chief of police, insisted on holding Qianfu's body, but refused to tell The Grandfather why. By the time a district court judge finally agreed to release the bones to The Grandfather, they had disappeared off the face of the earth. Clearly someone had gone ahead and disposed of them, but who and where? No one seemed to know … or, at any rate, no one was talking. Over the years, The Grandfather hired private investigator after private investigator. To no avail. To this day, we don't know where Qianfu's bones are.”

I took a deep breath. “That sucks, A-Ma, but we're talking about bones here, not an actual person and, besides, the whole thing happened over a hundred years ago. It's over and done with. Why not let sleeping dogs lie?”

She shook her head. “If we only could. The cosmos doesn't work that way, Miranda. Sleeping dogs may lie, but not disgruntled ancestors. They roam. They cause trouble. And as our family has learned to its great sorrow, they can cover vast distances in pursuit of those they seek. The Grandfather
moved his family here to Vancouver shortly after the terrible ordeal, but not even an entire mountain range has kept us safe from Qianfu's ghost.”

I was beginning to put two and two together – curse, disgruntled ancestor, missing bones. “Let me get this straight: your theory is that Qianfu's ghost is hounding us from an unmarked grave somewhere on the Prairies? That he's the one responsible for all our problems?”

“It isn't a theory,” she replied. “It's a fact.”

“But why?” I asked. “Even if there are such things as ghosts, why would one go around attacking his own descendants for no good reason?”

“Clearly he is buried in a place with very bad
feng shui
,” A-Ma replied. “And he doesn't like it one bit.”

“
F
eng shui
?” I repeated. It was a Chinese term that had floated around my house attaching itself to this or that for as long as I could remember. What it actually meant I had no idea.

“
Feng shui
is the ancient Chinese practice of using the laws of heaven and earth to draw down positive
chi
,” explained A-Ma. I must have looked blank because she continued, “Chi is essence – it's life force – oh, there's no word for it in English. Anyway, it's very important that a grave site have good
feng shui
. Like The Grandfather's. Its
feng shui
is excellent.”

From my perspective, the best thing about The Grandfather's grave site had been its view of the ocean; maybe
feng shui
was just a fancy way of saying that. “But Qianfu's dead,” I protested. “Why should he care about the view from his grave site? Why can't he just … I don't know … move on over or
truck on down the road or go toward the light or something?”

“
Feng shui
is more than a view,” she corrected me. (Well, scratch that theory.) “Don't you understand, Miranda? Souls are connected; families share karma. If a body is incorrectly laid to rest, it can't tap into beneficial chi, and that leads to great unhappiness for both the ancestor and his descendants. In Qianfu's case, this has resulted in his rebirth as an
e gui
.”

“As a what?”

A-Ma looked sharply at me. “Geomancy,
feng shui, e guis
…That Chinese school we sent you to – did you learn anything there?”

A gut twist of guilt. “Not really,” I confessed sheepishly. All us kids had been made to attend a Saturday-morning Chinese school when we were younger, so that we would know about Taoist beliefs and practices and Chinese culture in general. All of us but Oliver, that is; he wouldn't leave the house. I never understood how intelligent people living in the twenty-first century could believe in stuff like the Six Realms and the Wheel of Life, not to mention this whole wack of really lame gods like the Celestial Worthy of Numinous Treasure. (No, I'm not kidding; he was one of them.) Plus, doddering old Mr. Huang, who taught the class, was a one-man cure for insomnia, that singsong voice droning on and on. I could barely keep my eyes open. Besides, what's the use of learning something if it isn't true?

“I didn't think so.” A-Ma sounded exasperated. Which
was unnerving, since she was, like, the soul of patience. “This is why we sent you to that school. So that I wouldn't have to explain these things to you now.”

“Sorry,” I apologized. “It was unbelievably boring.”

“Nevertheless.” She frowned. Her face was pinched; she looked like she was in pain. “All right, then. An
e gui
is a hungry ghost. If a spirit is unhappy, because it died badly or wasn't buried properly or has no descendants to perform the proper rituals, it is reborn as a hungry ghost. It has no recourse but to attack human beings if it wants its needs met. In the meantime it must feed, and that is what the ghost that was Qianfu has been doing for the past century – feeding on us, on our energy and our life force.”

“Well, if his nose is so out of joint, why doesn't he show us where he's buried so we can dig him up and put him in some cooler place?”

“A hungry ghost is not a rational being, Miranda. It is nothing but a whirlwind of pain and desperate craving. You can't talk to one. You can't reason with one.”

“Great. So how am I supposed to deal with this ectoplasmic bummer?”

“You're not. Not alone, at any rate. Your mission is threefold – to safeguard the compass, to assist in finding Qianfu's body, and to provide technical support.”

“Assist
whom
? Provide technical support
to whom
? And what do you mean by ‘technical support'?”

She reached over and patted my hand. “All that will be revealed in due time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Exactly what I said.”

I played the age card. “I'm sixteen, A-Ma. How can I find a bag of bones buried in an unmarked grave a hundred years ago on the Prairies? I can't even drive.”

“Well, that's where Brian comes in.”

“
Brian?
”

“Yes, Brian. You remember Brian? Your cousin?” Now she was the one being sarcastic. “He's had his license for months now. You would have one too, if you had stopped studying long enough to take Drivers' Ed.”

I was completely flummoxed. You have no idea how annoying Brian can be. “But he's … I mean, I love him and all, but he's a total goof.”