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Chenguang whispered prayers as she walked. The two younger children would be all right. They were traumatised, yes, and hungry, but they were safe and strong. Ling would take care of them. Ling should be with her, looking for Jordan, but in the end, a person couldn’t be forced into seeing.
She fell into a rhythm, words spread like seeds with every step. Beside her, the river started up a wet muttering, and when Chenguang looked over it at the other bank, she thought she saw a dark shadow over there. Something pacing between the trees, watching, its stomach contracting with hunger. Glowering over at it, she wanted to lunge across the water, sink her clawed hands into its dark sinew and rip it apart piece by piece. It had threatened her granddaughter! Did so still!
She could feel the weight of its darkness on her, and her prayers increased. It was following her now, knowing she would lead it to Jordan.
But where was Jordan? Was she dead, as the twins had said? Was she drowned, as Ling believed so readily? Chenguang exhaled, ignoring the brooding monster across the water, and searched the trees instead. Searched the river too, when she found no scent of the girl.
There was darkness all around the demon as it moved between the trees, and she could almost feel the gnashing of its teeth. But the rest of the world was vivid, and standing on the riverbank with her eyes closed, Chenguang called on an old gift and examined the way everything connected, strands of energy from one place to another, back and forth, criss-crossing the world. And she looked for her granddaughter.
The demon edged closer to her, drawn by the fact of her life. She felt it push at her mind, try to reach out and taste her very soul and she recoiled in horror. It was so strong! How had the girl been able to resist this in the first place? Eyes snapping open, she looked around, uneasiness growing. Where was Jordan? She needed to find her.
Surely the girl would be unable to hold out against this horror for too long? Chenguang herself could imagine her will snapping like a string on her husband’s old Ruan – lute – and that creature over there coming across the water to snuffle amidst her bones and meat.
She spared a brief thought for the girl’s father. Almost certainly the man was dead. Chenguang bowed her head a moment in respect. She had not liked the man, but surely no man, no matter how black his heart, deserved the fate dished out by that monstrosity across the river.
Jordan was nowhere to be seen. Nor could Chenguang pick up the coloured thread she usually associated with her granddaughter – bright gold and red, she saw it as. The faintest echo of it was on the air, and she trembled. Was that the young girl’s soul leaving, or hanging on? She had to be found.
Chenguang had ranged far along the river bank now, and here and there in the soft dirt she’d seen footprints from the twins, sometimes in a headlong tumble, sometimes in a plodding despair. Nowhere were Jordan’s, however.
Last, soft rays of light overreached the trees, sent by the sinking sun. Soon, it would be too dark for Chenguang to search. Her daughter would be long back at the car by now, huddled in there with the twins, probably she’d even called the police. Chenguang cocked her head on the side, considering. Yes, the police were probably arriving as she stood here on the bank looking at the green swarm of water. They’d be poring over maps spread out on the hoods of their vehicles, talking earnestly among themselves, dividing the forest and river into quadrants, ready to come search with their heavy boots, crackling radios, and complete blindness.
They would bumble into the demon’s path, and, enraged, it would tear them limb from limb, and all there would be time for would be a last, horrified glimpse of something darker than night, with teeth sword-sharp and coming for their throats. Chenguang raised a palsied hand to her own throat and touched the loose skin there.
Then after the screams, the shrieks from the radio, the blind fleeing through the trees, the catching, the rending, then would come screams of a different sort, as the media came, following the scent of fresh blood, and the sightseers, the gawkers. And the monster would discover a fresh, never-ending supply of blood, gristle, and sin.
Why had she not told Ling to stay her hand – not to call the police in? She hadn’t thought to, that was it. She was old, and never before had she had to act like this except once. Once when she was young and strong and fearless, and it had paid off then. Chenguang wasn’t so sure it would this time. She clenched her fists and watched the sun withdraw from the river to graze the tops of the trees.
Only once had she used her own gifts in a bigger way than just to give thanks, to take the spirits offerings, to praise them and keep them happy. It had been a long time ago.
Ling thought she was an only child, but there had been another, before the girl was born. A boy child, fair and sturdy and strong. Smart, handsome, everything a doting mother and father could have dreamed of. His tantrums had been few, and his joy great.
And then, pegging out the laundry one day. Hot sun in a sky the colour of the cobalt blue on her mother’s porcelain. Flapping white sheets she laughed at as she wrestled them onto the line behind the kitchen garden, the scent of peony roses, lavender, and rosemary heavy on the breeze.
The boy had been playing in amongst the plants, head barely visible above the peas and cabbages. He’d been playing with the wooden pig his father had carved him. Chenguang had found it afterwards, lying feet in the air, and she’d wondered what had caught his attention and drawn him away.
A dragonfly perhaps. Those he loved.
Her own attention had been taken from the scent of fresh washing and heavy breezes, called from the line and the garden and the little boy by a white man come to garden, leaning over and hailing her, voice loud, imperious, from the bank maybe, or the big place in town her husband had just bought the tractor from. The tractor that would later take his life on an autumn afternoon.
But that was to come. On this day there was the sun, the sheets, the wooden pig, her little boy playing, and growing in her belly her daughter, there-but-not-there yet.
And the man. Beckoning her, talking fast, face sheened with sweat from the day, calling her away from the white snap of sheets on the line and the little boy playing in the garden.
Then there was the dragonfly. Probably a dragonfly, she’d said later to her husband. And when she came back to her sheets, the man sent away, told to telephone in the evening when her husband would be home, the crisp white fabric flapped still on the line, but the wooden pig lay feet in the air on the path, and the garden gate was open.
Only minutes, she’d been. Only minutes it had taken for her little boy to wander off.
Chenguang snapped back to the present with a shake of her head. It was no use to think of little Daquan. He was long gone, though still remembered, always remembered, and the frantic afternoon she’d spent looking for him, too panicked to run inside and telephone neighbours to help in the search, desperate to find him, not to miss him, not to walk right past him. And how far, after all, could a little boy walk?
But she’d found no trace of him. The afternoon had sank down heavily on the farm she’d lived her whole life, and she’d searched everywhere she could think of, her breath pounding in her head, heart ratcheting around under her ribs. He was gone.
At last, she’d stumbled into the shelter of the trees and thrown herself at the base of one, round belly pressing into the dirt, hands clasped together, and she’d begged the spirits to help her find her little boy.
In a blink, everything changed. No longer was there just shadow and dark, there were everywhere lights, strings of them, connecting everything, pulsing in the afternoon, webs of connections and she gazed in wonder, looked down at herself, saw roots of light dig deep into the ground, branch out of her hands into the sky as if she too was a tree.
And a little tickle from amongst it all. Daquan, her little boy. In a daze, she followed the strings, barely able to see where she stepped in the solid world, but her feet taking her back to the farm pond where she’d searched already, pushing aside the reeds at the edge, peering into the water. This time, though, she could see the dimming pulse of something she knew was her boy, her precious son. Even the tears in her eyes couldn’t break the seeing of the connections, though, and she pushed aside the dinghy already knowing she was too late. The vision of the world’s connection to everything faded as she carried him back to the house, water dripping from his dark hair, eyes closed as though he’d just gone to sleep, but chest still, filled with water instead of air.
She’d never sought to see that way again, but the knowledge that the world was one living, connected organism never left her. It never completely assuaged her grief, but she gave thanks for the knowledge anyway, and every week, an offering to the spirits in the trees who had given her the gift to see.