Part 3
Shit is happening! The writing is still bad, though.
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Back when Thousand was her spirit guide, the only times she’d entertained thoughts of punching him in the head had been - well, she’d never entertained thoughts of punching Thousand in the head. Fox’s head, on the other hand, was starting to look like it had a target painted across it, peeking out from under the fedora. The reasons she had not to punch him were quite numerous, though, starting at ‘it’s not nice’ and moving to ‘he may be human now but what about when he’s not?’ all the way down to ‘Thousand told me we should take care of each other’.
“You’re lucky I can drive,” she said flatly, “or we’d be taking a rolling deathtrap just like Thousand and I did.” Instead of answering he climbed into her nice, clean car and buckled in. His legs didn’t quite fit between the seat and the dashboard, which was unsurprising, considering that her passengers were most often her mother or her friends.
“There’s a lever underneath the front - that’s the one,” she said, putting the car into reverse. “Ready for liftoff?”
“I get airsick,” Fox said morosely, shoving the seat back. “And carsick. And motion-sick.”
“There are plastic bags in the glove compartment,” she said, switched gears, and drove off.
Driving was something of a violent spectator sport in Malaysia. Tailgating, lane-switching and running red lights were standard tactics, but Clea was quite fond of her skin and kept to the speed limit. Slowly the scenery passed from the narrow, crammed streets of the residential areas, punctuated with shopping malls and low, slightly run-down houses with remote-controlled metal gates and brick walls covered in cracked white paint to the edges of the city, where she could see the office buildings growing shinier and taller and the sidewalks becoming more frequent - more like places to actually walk rather than edges where the bitumen hadn’t been able to reach.
The city had always been a bit of a mystical place: she was sure it wasn’t meant to be, all glittering glass and steel and concrete and fake lights. But whenever she slipped into the outskirts, with the Twin Towers and KL Tower looming out from behind the curved, reflective faces of the space-age buildings, the trees were islands among the concrete and it still felt a lot more like a natural habitat to her than the dark green outdoors, where her parents had taken them camping, ever would.
“You’re going above the speed limit,” Fox said, just a second after she’d pressed the accelerator. “And you just ran a red light. I can tell you that I did not expect to spend my first day with my charge covering up her traffic violations.”
“I’m not your charge,” she said. “We’re partners.” Banks and hotels eased by outside the windows. One of the hotels, a red-roofed colonial-style building left over from the occupation, caught her eye. But no ghost drifted out to follow her car for the next hundred metres; she bit her lip and stared straight ahead, swallowing around the lump in her throat.
“Keep telling yourself that,” he muttered. “Slow down.”
“If you want to drive, really, you can.” She slowed down anyway. Somebody in a large Peugeot behind her honked.
“If I operate human machinery, the machine ghost will start to devour my flesh from within. Does your car have airbags?”
“I’m fairly sure that using an airbag could count as ‘operating’,” she said. “Depending on how fussy your machine ghost is.” They shot onto Jalan Kinabalu without braking. She couldn’t help sneaking a sideways glance at Fox as she pushed down hard on the accelerator, watching his knuckles tighten as his black-gloved fingers curled into his trenchcoat hem. It brought a tiny, tiny smile to her face.
Past the hospital, where she would normally have seen a hovering cloudy aura of the restless and frightened newly-dead. Nothing. She busied herself with changing lanes, glancing at Fox as she did.
“Keep your eyes on the road!” he growled. He had jammed his hat further down over his eyes.
“I am,” she said, accelerating to cut off a lane-changer. “Can I ask you a question?”
“That maneuver was ridiculously dangerous and that question utterly redundant,” he said. She sighed and took the next bewildering exit, a conflicting circular jumble of roads filled with indecisive drivers, passing over a dried-up riverbed. She could see a few lonely, scrubby trees attempting to colonize the dry yellow land and felt a sudden pang of pity for them. If she had been able to stop, she would have, but she doubted Fox would appreciate the pit stop to go and comfort a couple of trees.
“Slow down,” he said sharply, a moment later, when she was slowly drawing up to the traffic lights. “What is it?”
“What do you do?” she said. “Are you really a fox-spirit?”
“It’s in the damn name,” he said. “Are you stupid?”
“It seemed too obvious.”
“If I made up another ridiculous, humanized name, you’d start calling me by it.” He sounded like the idea made him nauseous. “I don’t need to be more human. I’ll start hallucinating I’m not inhuman. This meat form is obscene. How do you live in this thing?” He raised one gloved hand and shook it back and forth like it was loosely attached to his wrist by strings.
Clea kept quiet, because any response she could think of seemed likely to set him off on an inane tangent. The lights went green. They motored off.
“Thousand,” he muttered. “Honestly.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the name Thousand,” she said, gently, trying to fight the urge to giggle.
“The number is ugly and ostentatious,” he said, then fell into a brooding silence, and she started to count. One. Two. Three. “And if you’re not careful the number is bad luck, especially if you were born under a bad star. It makes you more prone to lymphatic cancer and acidosis. He should watch his diet and stop eating so much cake. Change lanes! Change lanes now!” He hadn’t even lasted until five.
“You backseat-drive like my aunt,” she said.
“My backseat driving will save you from getting your shinbones rammed through your torso in a car crash,” he said through clenched teeth. “Where are we going? Should you be driving so fast? The faster you drive, the easier it’s going to be for them to make it look like an accident.”
“We’re going to a client’s house,” she said. Ex-client. “I need to tell them I have to cancel.” Expectantly, she awaited his nasty commentary, but he surprised her by saying absolutely nothing. The silence stretched on uncomfortably, and then she gave up on conversation entirely.
They pulled off the main roads onto the narrower sides, edged by the high stone foundations of houses and more walls and more iron fences. The houses were bigger here. Some had gardens. Two or more cars. It was a nice neighbourhood, just like the one she lived in, which made her eyes suddenly prickle and she took a corner at high speed to try and distract herself from the possibility that she might not see home for a long time.
Technically, nothing was going to stop her from going home for a visit or a prolonged stay - but it didn’t feel right to be going home with this unfinished; no lucrative and steady income, and if she didn’t do it now then when would she? ‘No spirit guide’ was out of the question. She was the youngest child of her parents, and being a bomoh was a dying skill.
She glanced at Fox and felt a brief pang of pity for whichever poor bomoh had, at some time or another, gotten stuck with him. Did the spirits have a choice? It seemed like it; Thousand had always had a bit of a tendency to brag about how well she was doing, but that seemed almost like a parent thing. She thought about Thousand and it brought a sharp stab of bitterness. She would’ve been happy to have him as her guide for all her life. He’d been nice to her, and always known the right thing to do or say.
They pulled into the road, which curved around into a dead end, and she parked the car half on the grass.
“What,” Fox said, “That?” He sounded incredulous.
“Yes,” she said. “What’s wrong with it?” It was a nice house, two-storied and painted white with a blue roof. There were Chinese tiles atop the walls and it had a sliding grille gate of the same blue as the roof, and it had a tiny garden inhabited with neat flowerpots and a small patch of short, prickly grass. Her mother would have approved. The only thing that looked out of place was a gold-painted dragon curled around a large blue porcelain ball; an ensemble carefully perched on the wall.
“Idiot!” He exploded out of the car in a mess of flapping black coat and white ponytail, jamming on a pair of sunglasses that he appeared to have pulled out of his hat. “Can you even see?” She blinked. He was abruptly a lot closer than she remembered him being a second ago, and he put a hand atop her head and cranked it to one side. She yelped. A dog started barking and he turned and hissed at it and it barked louder.
“Now they’ve seen me,” he muttered, managing somehow to huddle while standing up, and let go of her head. “Look at it. Look!”
Warily, she glanced at the house through the corner of her eyes.
The gate was rusting, paint cracked, hanging lazily off its hinges. Beyond it the grass had gotten overgrown with weeds and was spilling onto the tiles of the driveway, the flowerpots cracked to show the powerful bulging roots. The plants inside were no longer neat: the leaves glistened with health, the trunks were as wide around as her thigh, unripe and eerie fruits swinging in and out of visibility - there was a wind blowing through the branches that she couldn’t feel. There was something moving inside the house, something large, heavy-bodied, visible only by its movements through the wide-flung windows, its loud breath clear to her even from where they were.
“It’s haunted,” she said stupidly. The torn-off door swung back and forth on its hinges, making a shrieking sound on the edge of her hearing. Despite it being mid-afternoon she could hardly see inside. There was the shriek of some unknown bird. The dog was still barking at them, with the occasional fits of growling, glaring at them with dripping jaws.
“It’s possessed,” he growled.
“Okay,” she said, and turned tail, scrambling back to the car door with a clatter of heels on tarmac. He followed just as quickly, and she revved the car to life and made a hurried three-point turn in the neighbour’s driveway. It was still too close for her comfort. The skin on the back of her neck felt freezing cold as they shot out of the one-way street back onto the main road, and her breath was wheezing in and out of her chest. It took her three traffic lights and one major junction to realise that she hadn’t even put on her seat belt. The dog never stopped barking.
They drove in silence for a long time, meandering from intersection to intersection, her calculating how far they were from home and how quickly she could get back there and how much her mother would yell at her if she showed up not two hours after she had left. She couldn’t take on whatever had consumed that house.
“What,” she began, and swallowed, “I’ve never seen that happen before.” She swallowed again, and took another attempt, with, “What did that?”
“Get me a patch of dirt and a stick and I’ll tell you,” he said shortly.
“Is that your power?” she said hesitantly.
“I don’t have any power while I’m meat.” Fox sniffed. “I know how to do what I need to, but it’s not like I can. That’s what you’re meant to do.” He gave her a brief glare.
“So I can’t talk to the dead any more because Thousand’s gone,” she said, and it had made sense before, but saying it helped push the pieces together. Her stomach jerked. “Does this mean that I can’t speak to the dead again?”
“I don’t know,” he snapped, “sort your own mess out. Watch that truck!”
“I’m trying!” She slid out at the next exit, heading towards the city centre. “Can’t you help at all? Where am I meant to go? How am I meant to find my teachers?”
“Am I supposed to know anything? Go slower - I haven’t been to this country in over two thousand years!”
“Didn’t Thousand put you with me to help me?” She was on the verge of shouting very loudly. Clea was more than capable of shouting. Growing up with Cordelia, and lacking Chloe’s sharpness, she’d had to learn how to be loud in order to get heard. It was a habit she’d shed as she’d aged, but she couldn’t help it; Fox just seemed to make her juvenile and petty on principle.
“No, he made me surrogate babysitter and ran,” Fox spat. “Moron! Do I look like I’m here to be helpful?”
“Well, thank you for explaining that, at least,” she said quietly.
At the next cheap cafe she recognized, she parked the car.
“Why are you stopping?” he said. “You’re leaving yourself in the open. Anybody could get to us.” Ignoring him, Clea pulled open the change drawer with a loud rattle and picked out some change for the meter.
“They could be anywhere,” he said, raising his voice. “Don’t do - take the keys out of the car! They could have substituted them while you weren’t looking! Are those keys electronic? Do you know how easy they are to alter by a skilled ghost?”
“I’m going to get some lunch,” she said, slamming the change drawer shut. “You can join me if you want. By which I mean, if you’re not going to insult the hawker and call him an agent of a greater evil trying to silence you, or something.” She tossed one hand up in the air. “I don’t - I don’t care. Whatever. There are maps in the glovebox, pass them to me. Oh, it should be safe, I removed the vipers from there last week and cleaned out all the sarin gas.” Despite herself she felt a little proud of that remark. It was almost like something Chloe would say, or Thousand.
He handed her the maps, with only a mutter of, “You mock me, but mockery won’t save you, squishy meat.” Clea snatched them from him with a trembling hand, and abruptly ran out of anger steam. It was hard to stay angry at someone who she could be spending the next year with - something she was, unwillingly, coming to accept - and who was Thousand’s friend. She let out a long, quiet sigh.
“I’m sorry for yelling,” she said weakly. “I don’t like what’s been happening. It’s really difficult to deal with, but I’m sorry I took it out on you.” Fox gave her a long look.
“You are an incredible doormat,” he said.
“Sorry,” she mumbled. He hit himself in the forehead with the heel of his palm and muttered something that sounded like, “thicker than a tank of lard on a cold day,” and she pretended not to hear it.
“Are you going to get some food?” she said. “I know you don’t need to eat, but the food here is nice. The beef rendang is really good.”
“These places don’t have any sense of hygiene,” he said. “I’ll get cholera.”
“You can watch the food being prepared.” She tapped the dashboard. “Coming?”
Eventually, he did. She coaxed him into the café on the condition that they took a seat near the kitchen and in clear view of the car - “in case of saboteurs or possessive spirits”, he said. She tried not to argue. And tried not to sympathise as he carefully selected the cleanest-looking chair from a stack of seven.
“The menu’s over there,” she said, pointing to the opposite wall. Sheets of paper with various names of dishes scrawled across them had been taped up. “What did you want?”
“I can’t read it,” he said.
“Maybe if you took off your sunglasses?” she said, as gently as she could.
“No.” He shoved them more firmly onto his face, as though trying to prove her wrong. “I need them. The sunlight will burn my eyes. I still can’t read it with the sunglasses off, by the way.”
“Oh.” She paused. “You need glasses?”
“I don’t need glasses. I can see just fine when I’m not meat.” His lower lip tightened. “A fox with glasses would look ridiculous.” Clea pictured it, and giggled.
“It’s not funny,” he hissed. She subsided into smiling, but the image was persistent and adorable.
“Aren’t you hot?” she said a moment later, as he jerked out of the way when the sun appeared from behind a cloud. Mummified as he was in that horrible, horrible trenchcoat, she couldn’t see why he was worrying too much. The only thing he looked likely to die from was heatstroke.
“No,” he said stiffly. “If I take the trenchcoat off I’ll be struck by fire and catch skin cancer.”
“Oh,” she said, and then ‘oh’ again, longer this time. “Okay.” To save herself from having to make potentially embarrassing comments along the lines of ‘you’re an albino’, she unfolded one of the maps.
“I was thinking that we could maybe head to Pulau Tioman,” she said, talking to the table, “In case my animal’s a sea-spirit. I’ve heard that islands are the best places. And my mother told me there was a bomoh in Kuala Rompin, which is on the way.”
There was a long uncomfortable silence. She darted a look at him from behind her fringe.
“An island,” he said flatly. “I assume we’re going to take a boat.”
“Yes,” she said.
“We’ll drown,” he said. “I’m not on good terms with the sea-spirits. I’d prefer not to.”
“We won’t drown, we’ll take the ferry,” she said.
“You say it like one excludes the other.” The drinks arrived; she pushed the teapot to him and fastened onto the iced Coke with predatory speed. Coke was forbidden in her mother’s house. All soft-drinks were. Her only chances to sneak any were when she went out with friends, and woe betide her if she brought any back. Cordelia did tend to get away with the occasional Japanese drink by claiming it was iced tea, but Clea doubted she’d get such leeway from her mother.
Her eyes slid to Fox, who was glaring at her drink like it had committed a mortal offence.
“Coke?” He sounded ready to have a heart attack; only one ignore away from frothing at the mouth. “That is made out of acids and chemicals. It’s going to dissolve your stomach walls.”
“That’s an urban legend, you know,” she said out of the corner of her mouth, teeth still fastened on the straw.
“It’s going to upset the acid balance in your stomach and devour all of your entrails,” he said without missing a beat. “It also leaves you more open to demonic possession.” Clea paused mid-sip.
“Really?” she said.
“No,” he said, “even demons won’t touch that filth. And we’re not going to this island place. Isn’t there somewhere on the mainland where you can commune with the sea-spirits?”
“Why don’t you use your power?” she said. “Or knowledge? Ask it if the ferry is safe.”
Fox gave her a long, long glare. She held her ground, but the nervous turning of the glass between her hands was probably a tell - it was hard facing those flat red eyes. Then he shoved his chair back with a faint plastic-on-tile grate and trod off to the nearest tree, sitting lonely in a small circle of dirt surrounded by cracked cement.
“We’ll be back,” she told the waiter, who was watching them bemusedly, and hurried after Fox.
By the time she’d reached he had dusted off a short stick and handed it gingerly to her. She accepted it, equally gingerly.
“Make sixteen lines of dots in the dirt,” he said. “Don’t count the dots. Make them long as you can before you get sick of it.” She did, and blinked as she started crossing them off. Pair by pair, until either one or two remained; quickly, she sketched a geometric pattern of triangles and boxes in the dirt and began arranging the dots in groups, apparently at random - two, one, one, one. In the next triangle - one, two, two, two. Over her shoulder, she glanced at Fox. His lips were thin and tight.
“You learn fast,” he said.
“Thousand said the same thing,” she said cautiously. He sniffed.
“Do you know how to read it?” He knelt down beside her, carefully not touching anything. It was about then, when the two of them were huddled together staring at the dirt, that she realised he had exquisitely nice shoes. Point-toed. Neat, carefully-stitched seams. Smooth, un-scuffed leather. They had a glow that said money. They were much nicer than his trenchcoat; they were something Thousand would wear, except she had only had the opportunity to see Thousand’s shoes twice and both times they had been American canvas sneakers. Why on earth he was wearing such an ugly trenchcoat when he had such good-looking shoes escaped her. It almost made her wonder what he wore under the trenchcoat.
“First-” She tore her eyes away from his nice, nice shoes and continued arranging the dots. These two add up, she thought, so that makes this shape - and she continued to make the strange little figures. Finally, all the boxes were filled. “No - maybe.” She squinted, and then slumped. “No.”
“This one is the judge,” he said, pointing at the last figure. “Good judge. These two,” he pointed at the two above it, “are the witnesses. Bad witnesses. It means that you’ll succeed after some trouble.” He squinted - she thought he was squinting, anyway, not that she could tell with the sunglasses. “Do another spread. This is for staying on the mainland.” She did another sixteen rows of dots.
The first figure - one dot, one, one, two - formed, and he caught her wrist.
“Al-'ataba al-kharidj,” he said, sounding bitter. “Fine. We’ll go to the damn island,” and with that he stood up and started to trudge back to the café. “Don’t leave the stick behind! And erase the reading!” Cautiously, Clea balanced on one stilettoed foot and brushed dirt over the diagrams. She took a moment to stare at the stick. It looked unremarkable. She dusted it off anyway, and followed quickly after Fox.
“That’s very bad?” she said, catching up.
“If that’s the first figure, stop the reading,” he said.
“Okay,” she said. Their food had arrived, and all the ice in her Coke had melted.
After lunch they drove, an uneventful drive along flat highways edged by palm oil plantations, punctuated by the occasional rock quarry. Most of the highways appeared to have been punched directly through mountains; for at least a quarter of the way they were edged on both sides by marbled strata, pinkish-red and white and orange. Apart from the occasional tollbooth - “Invented by demons.”
“I knew it!”
“It was sarcasm, squishy meat.” - the road was empty of all other human beings, which made her pull over at least once to bawl helplessly while Fox climbed out of the car and huddled in the meagre shade of a scrawny saga tree to keep from getting whatever she had.
“Homesickness isn’t contagious, you know,” she said to him later, voice cracked. At least her makeup had already been cleaned off. It saved her the trouble of mopping off her mascara.
“I’m not taking any chances,” he growled, climbing back in. “Did you move my seat?”
“No,” she said. “Nothing else did either, okay? I’ve been watching. If you really want to check you can shove your hand under the seat and risk the beartrap I put under there to keep gremlins from interfering.”
She seemed to be good at the sarcasm thing when she was upset, she thought.
Fox eventually fell into a restless doze, which he jerked out of occasionally to snap at her to slow down. They arrived in Mersing that night and she promptly made a beeline for the four-star side of town, all glittering lights and faux-waterfall fountains and even valets in neat vests despite the heat.
On their way through the suburbs, she thought she glimpsed a blue-gated house - she nearly slowed down to gape at it, earning her a loud honking from the car behind her. Fox did not wake up. Apparently he only offered unwanted advice when it was unnecessary. The blue-gated house turned out to be just a regular house, when she subjected it to the corner-of-the-eyes test, and so she headed for the big, glittering Mariott, whose neon logo beckoned.
“That one.” A black-gloved hand shot into her vision, and she squeaked and nearly swerved the car into a ditch.
“What was that?” growled Fox, ten seconds later, when he had dared to emerge from behind his hat. “Can you drive?”
“Not when you do this-” She demonstrated. “-while I’m driving!”
“Don’t take your hands off the wheel!” If he hadn’t been pale, she was sure he would have gone the same colour. For a few seconds all she could hear from him was loud, quick breathing, and then he slowly eased his grip off the dashboard. “That hotel. There. Go to it.”
Fairly sure he was on the verge of a heart attack, she did. It was large, and fancy, and looked like more than she was willing to afford as they pulled into the marble-pillared lobby. Fox tumbled out of the car with, she noted, shaky legs and more than a fair share of muttered insults.
“Go in,” he said, leaning on the car as though his knees were about to fold in. “You have a reservation under Su Bai Ren. Sign for it, pay on your card.”
“My name isn’t Su Bai Ren,” she said.
“I know, alright? I’ll take care of it. Get in there and lie like you’d lie to a priest.” Faced with Fox’s impenetrable logic, she did. Someone opened the door for her and she sidled in like she belonged.
The receptionist didn’t seem to pick up on the slight guilt, which gave her enough confidence to attempt the next part.
“I’ve got a reservation,” she said.
“What’s your name?”
“Su Bai Ren.” She nearly stumbled over the lie. “Here’s my card.” The receptionist scanned it, nodded and handed her a pen. Clea paused. Did she sign like herself, or like Miss Su should sign? In the end she opted for her own signature, and the receptionist made absolutely no comment for a second, leaving Clea nervously shifting from foot to foot and wondering if she was going to be surrounded by police at any second.
“That looks fine, Miss Su,” said the receptionist, startling Clea out of the mental image of her mother bailing her out of jail. “Here’s your room keys. You’re on the sixth floor.”
“Oh,” Clea said. “Thank you. Thank you very much.” With that, she escaped out into the sweaty evening heat, to where Fox was waiting.
“How did you do that?” she whispered, drawing level with him.
“You did,” he said. “Don’t ask me.” Clea stared.
“I thought you were taking care of it,” she said.
“And you trusted me, squishy meat,” he said darkly, pulling a duffel bag out of the backseat that she was sure hadn’t been there when she’d met him. “It worked. Maybe you’re magical.”
“That wasn’t your power?” she said numbly. “You didn’t-”
“Illusions will destroy my life energy and have a good chance of causing me nerve paralysis.” He shuddered. “The last time an illusion found me I was unconscious for two months. It was probably invading my system and using my organs to fuel its reproductive cycle.”
“I’m going to park the car,” she said, because there was really nothing else she could say. “Here’s your room key.” He nearly dropped it when she handed it to him, hissing, “Magnets! Do you know what those can do?”
“Open your hotel room?” she said, getting into the car. “I have no idea how you can make up entire lists of fake symptoms for everything but you can’t explain how I just got away with identity fraud, by the way.”
Fox eyeballed her, then turned and started warily for the hotel. He waited a long time on the nature strip for cars that never came; when he seemed to have convinced himself that he was safe, he scrambled across, his black trenchcoat flapping. A black trenchcoat, no matter how ugly, somehow managed to make a lot of things look dignified, she thought. If they hadn’t been ridiculously impractical she would have thought about getting one.
That night she was asleep almost the moment her head hit the pillow. In between the crying, the running and the mysterious powers, the day had taken a lot out of her. Fox, to her relief, was in an adjacent room - the thought of arguing with him over the ability of an electric lamp to make him blind was frighteningly realistic.
Briefly after that she blinked, and blinked again, aware of a faint light just above her. She looked up. It was a small, plasticky spotlight, just like the sort in airplanes. She looked to one side - across an aisle were a row of deep, comfortable seats, occupied by people to various degrees of ‘awake’. A small boy was playing some game on a lit TV screen in the seat in front of him.
She looked to the other side.
“Hello,” Thousand said, raising a sleeping mask. “I was afraid you wouldn’t make it.”
“Thousand,” she said, and relaxed. “Hi.”
“You seem to be alright,” he said. “Not dead yet, which is always excellent. Are you alright?”
“Not really.” Clea shifted in her seat. “I’ve had to leave home.”
“Oh,” he said sympathetically. “I’m very sorry. Searching for a new spirit guide, I presume?” She nodded. “The great journey. Your parents each took theirs. I suppose it would be a shame if you had to miss out on this, but it is a bit unfortunate that it had to happen like this.” He sighed. “Still, you’ll do well. How has it been?”
Clea told him - about the house, Fox, strange powers she didn’t remember acquiring - and he nodded and listened and chuckled a little when she talked about Fox.
“Fox is terrible,” he said, “but excellent help. Just don’t argue with his paranoia and you’ll be fine. It mostly only affects him.” He sighed and stared into space for a moment, as if recalling something, then turned back to her. “So you’re going to this island?”
“Yes,” she said. “Where are you going?”
“This plane?” He tapped the window. “The United States. There’s something I’ll need to do there. Hopefully, I’ll be able to bring you too.”
“That would be nice,” she said, nodding. “Which part?”
“Colorado,” he said. “Lovely mountains.” Thousand paused. “Clea, Fox is only a temporary solution. Don’t get too attached to his power.”
“His power - the divining?” Clea sat up. “What about the illusions?”
“The illusions,” he sighed. “Those may just be your powers manifesting. Presumably they’ll get stronger as you get closer to your spirit. I’m just speculating, though. There might be another explanation.”
“It would be a really good power to have if I could control it,” she said slowly. Thousand smiled.
“So much potential for no good,” he said cheerfully. “Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll get a hold on things. Wake up, Clea. It’s nearly breakfast time.” The world melted.
She yawned and stretched awake, the muscles in her back straightening and tightening, and flopped out of bed. The carpet was wonderfully soft beneath her toes. She sat there staring blankly at it for a moment, then plodded out to the balcony. Mersing in the morning was like suburban Kuala Lumpur: she could hear the morning calls from the mosque and the rumble of morning traffic, not yet at its peak. From above everything was pleasantly alien. She looked down. She looked again. Then she ran back inside, sped out the door and hammered on the neighbouring door.
“Fox,” she said, her voice about two octaves higher and three times louder. “Fox!” The door swung open under her knuckles the next time she knocked, and he blinked down at her.
“What?” he said, gravelly-voiced, and stumbled in squinting as she shoved past him.
“Look,” she said, voice shaking, “Out the balcony.” He followed her out. Not before snatching up his sunglasses and hat, however. She wondered, briefly, if he ever washed his hair. “There!”
“What-” He staggered out, tossing a towel over his bare shoulders. About six stories down, just behind the hotel, was a familiar blue-roofed, blue-gated house. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the possessive trunk curling over the rooftiles, rustling at her.
“That house is following us,” she said, and her voice broke on the last syllable.
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Word count so far: 15960!
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Back when Thousand was her spirit guide, the only times she’d entertained thoughts of punching him in the head had been - well, she’d never entertained thoughts of punching Thousand in the head. Fox’s head, on the other hand, was starting to look like it had a target painted across it, peeking out from under the fedora. The reasons she had not to punch him were quite numerous, though, starting at ‘it’s not nice’ and moving to ‘he may be human now but what about when he’s not?’ all the way down to ‘Thousand told me we should take care of each other’.
“You’re lucky I can drive,” she said flatly, “or we’d be taking a rolling deathtrap just like Thousand and I did.” Instead of answering he climbed into her nice, clean car and buckled in. His legs didn’t quite fit between the seat and the dashboard, which was unsurprising, considering that her passengers were most often her mother or her friends.
“There’s a lever underneath the front - that’s the one,” she said, putting the car into reverse. “Ready for liftoff?”
“I get airsick,” Fox said morosely, shoving the seat back. “And carsick. And motion-sick.”
“There are plastic bags in the glove compartment,” she said, switched gears, and drove off.
Driving was something of a violent spectator sport in Malaysia. Tailgating, lane-switching and running red lights were standard tactics, but Clea was quite fond of her skin and kept to the speed limit. Slowly the scenery passed from the narrow, crammed streets of the residential areas, punctuated with shopping malls and low, slightly run-down houses with remote-controlled metal gates and brick walls covered in cracked white paint to the edges of the city, where she could see the office buildings growing shinier and taller and the sidewalks becoming more frequent - more like places to actually walk rather than edges where the bitumen hadn’t been able to reach.
The city had always been a bit of a mystical place: she was sure it wasn’t meant to be, all glittering glass and steel and concrete and fake lights. But whenever she slipped into the outskirts, with the Twin Towers and KL Tower looming out from behind the curved, reflective faces of the space-age buildings, the trees were islands among the concrete and it still felt a lot more like a natural habitat to her than the dark green outdoors, where her parents had taken them camping, ever would.
“You’re going above the speed limit,” Fox said, just a second after she’d pressed the accelerator. “And you just ran a red light. I can tell you that I did not expect to spend my first day with my charge covering up her traffic violations.”
“I’m not your charge,” she said. “We’re partners.” Banks and hotels eased by outside the windows. One of the hotels, a red-roofed colonial-style building left over from the occupation, caught her eye. But no ghost drifted out to follow her car for the next hundred metres; she bit her lip and stared straight ahead, swallowing around the lump in her throat.
“Keep telling yourself that,” he muttered. “Slow down.”
“If you want to drive, really, you can.” She slowed down anyway. Somebody in a large Peugeot behind her honked.
“If I operate human machinery, the machine ghost will start to devour my flesh from within. Does your car have airbags?”
“I’m fairly sure that using an airbag could count as ‘operating’,” she said. “Depending on how fussy your machine ghost is.” They shot onto Jalan Kinabalu without braking. She couldn’t help sneaking a sideways glance at Fox as she pushed down hard on the accelerator, watching his knuckles tighten as his black-gloved fingers curled into his trenchcoat hem. It brought a tiny, tiny smile to her face.
Past the hospital, where she would normally have seen a hovering cloudy aura of the restless and frightened newly-dead. Nothing. She busied herself with changing lanes, glancing at Fox as she did.
“Keep your eyes on the road!” he growled. He had jammed his hat further down over his eyes.
“I am,” she said, accelerating to cut off a lane-changer. “Can I ask you a question?”
“That maneuver was ridiculously dangerous and that question utterly redundant,” he said. She sighed and took the next bewildering exit, a conflicting circular jumble of roads filled with indecisive drivers, passing over a dried-up riverbed. She could see a few lonely, scrubby trees attempting to colonize the dry yellow land and felt a sudden pang of pity for them. If she had been able to stop, she would have, but she doubted Fox would appreciate the pit stop to go and comfort a couple of trees.
“Slow down,” he said sharply, a moment later, when she was slowly drawing up to the traffic lights. “What is it?”
“What do you do?” she said. “Are you really a fox-spirit?”
“It’s in the damn name,” he said. “Are you stupid?”
“It seemed too obvious.”
“If I made up another ridiculous, humanized name, you’d start calling me by it.” He sounded like the idea made him nauseous. “I don’t need to be more human. I’ll start hallucinating I’m not inhuman. This meat form is obscene. How do you live in this thing?” He raised one gloved hand and shook it back and forth like it was loosely attached to his wrist by strings.
Clea kept quiet, because any response she could think of seemed likely to set him off on an inane tangent. The lights went green. They motored off.
“Thousand,” he muttered. “Honestly.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the name Thousand,” she said, gently, trying to fight the urge to giggle.
“The number is ugly and ostentatious,” he said, then fell into a brooding silence, and she started to count. One. Two. Three. “And if you’re not careful the number is bad luck, especially if you were born under a bad star. It makes you more prone to lymphatic cancer and acidosis. He should watch his diet and stop eating so much cake. Change lanes! Change lanes now!” He hadn’t even lasted until five.
“You backseat-drive like my aunt,” she said.
“My backseat driving will save you from getting your shinbones rammed through your torso in a car crash,” he said through clenched teeth. “Where are we going? Should you be driving so fast? The faster you drive, the easier it’s going to be for them to make it look like an accident.”
“We’re going to a client’s house,” she said. Ex-client. “I need to tell them I have to cancel.” Expectantly, she awaited his nasty commentary, but he surprised her by saying absolutely nothing. The silence stretched on uncomfortably, and then she gave up on conversation entirely.
They pulled off the main roads onto the narrower sides, edged by the high stone foundations of houses and more walls and more iron fences. The houses were bigger here. Some had gardens. Two or more cars. It was a nice neighbourhood, just like the one she lived in, which made her eyes suddenly prickle and she took a corner at high speed to try and distract herself from the possibility that she might not see home for a long time.
Technically, nothing was going to stop her from going home for a visit or a prolonged stay - but it didn’t feel right to be going home with this unfinished; no lucrative and steady income, and if she didn’t do it now then when would she? ‘No spirit guide’ was out of the question. She was the youngest child of her parents, and being a bomoh was a dying skill.
She glanced at Fox and felt a brief pang of pity for whichever poor bomoh had, at some time or another, gotten stuck with him. Did the spirits have a choice? It seemed like it; Thousand had always had a bit of a tendency to brag about how well she was doing, but that seemed almost like a parent thing. She thought about Thousand and it brought a sharp stab of bitterness. She would’ve been happy to have him as her guide for all her life. He’d been nice to her, and always known the right thing to do or say.
They pulled into the road, which curved around into a dead end, and she parked the car half on the grass.
“What,” Fox said, “That?” He sounded incredulous.
“Yes,” she said. “What’s wrong with it?” It was a nice house, two-storied and painted white with a blue roof. There were Chinese tiles atop the walls and it had a sliding grille gate of the same blue as the roof, and it had a tiny garden inhabited with neat flowerpots and a small patch of short, prickly grass. Her mother would have approved. The only thing that looked out of place was a gold-painted dragon curled around a large blue porcelain ball; an ensemble carefully perched on the wall.
“Idiot!” He exploded out of the car in a mess of flapping black coat and white ponytail, jamming on a pair of sunglasses that he appeared to have pulled out of his hat. “Can you even see?” She blinked. He was abruptly a lot closer than she remembered him being a second ago, and he put a hand atop her head and cranked it to one side. She yelped. A dog started barking and he turned and hissed at it and it barked louder.
“Now they’ve seen me,” he muttered, managing somehow to huddle while standing up, and let go of her head. “Look at it. Look!”
Warily, she glanced at the house through the corner of her eyes.
The gate was rusting, paint cracked, hanging lazily off its hinges. Beyond it the grass had gotten overgrown with weeds and was spilling onto the tiles of the driveway, the flowerpots cracked to show the powerful bulging roots. The plants inside were no longer neat: the leaves glistened with health, the trunks were as wide around as her thigh, unripe and eerie fruits swinging in and out of visibility - there was a wind blowing through the branches that she couldn’t feel. There was something moving inside the house, something large, heavy-bodied, visible only by its movements through the wide-flung windows, its loud breath clear to her even from where they were.
“It’s haunted,” she said stupidly. The torn-off door swung back and forth on its hinges, making a shrieking sound on the edge of her hearing. Despite it being mid-afternoon she could hardly see inside. There was the shriek of some unknown bird. The dog was still barking at them, with the occasional fits of growling, glaring at them with dripping jaws.
“It’s possessed,” he growled.
“Okay,” she said, and turned tail, scrambling back to the car door with a clatter of heels on tarmac. He followed just as quickly, and she revved the car to life and made a hurried three-point turn in the neighbour’s driveway. It was still too close for her comfort. The skin on the back of her neck felt freezing cold as they shot out of the one-way street back onto the main road, and her breath was wheezing in and out of her chest. It took her three traffic lights and one major junction to realise that she hadn’t even put on her seat belt. The dog never stopped barking.
They drove in silence for a long time, meandering from intersection to intersection, her calculating how far they were from home and how quickly she could get back there and how much her mother would yell at her if she showed up not two hours after she had left. She couldn’t take on whatever had consumed that house.
“What,” she began, and swallowed, “I’ve never seen that happen before.” She swallowed again, and took another attempt, with, “What did that?”
“Get me a patch of dirt and a stick and I’ll tell you,” he said shortly.
“Is that your power?” she said hesitantly.
“I don’t have any power while I’m meat.” Fox sniffed. “I know how to do what I need to, but it’s not like I can. That’s what you’re meant to do.” He gave her a brief glare.
“So I can’t talk to the dead any more because Thousand’s gone,” she said, and it had made sense before, but saying it helped push the pieces together. Her stomach jerked. “Does this mean that I can’t speak to the dead again?”
“I don’t know,” he snapped, “sort your own mess out. Watch that truck!”
“I’m trying!” She slid out at the next exit, heading towards the city centre. “Can’t you help at all? Where am I meant to go? How am I meant to find my teachers?”
“Am I supposed to know anything? Go slower - I haven’t been to this country in over two thousand years!”
“Didn’t Thousand put you with me to help me?” She was on the verge of shouting very loudly. Clea was more than capable of shouting. Growing up with Cordelia, and lacking Chloe’s sharpness, she’d had to learn how to be loud in order to get heard. It was a habit she’d shed as she’d aged, but she couldn’t help it; Fox just seemed to make her juvenile and petty on principle.
“No, he made me surrogate babysitter and ran,” Fox spat. “Moron! Do I look like I’m here to be helpful?”
“Well, thank you for explaining that, at least,” she said quietly.
At the next cheap cafe she recognized, she parked the car.
“Why are you stopping?” he said. “You’re leaving yourself in the open. Anybody could get to us.” Ignoring him, Clea pulled open the change drawer with a loud rattle and picked out some change for the meter.
“They could be anywhere,” he said, raising his voice. “Don’t do - take the keys out of the car! They could have substituted them while you weren’t looking! Are those keys electronic? Do you know how easy they are to alter by a skilled ghost?”
“I’m going to get some lunch,” she said, slamming the change drawer shut. “You can join me if you want. By which I mean, if you’re not going to insult the hawker and call him an agent of a greater evil trying to silence you, or something.” She tossed one hand up in the air. “I don’t - I don’t care. Whatever. There are maps in the glovebox, pass them to me. Oh, it should be safe, I removed the vipers from there last week and cleaned out all the sarin gas.” Despite herself she felt a little proud of that remark. It was almost like something Chloe would say, or Thousand.
He handed her the maps, with only a mutter of, “You mock me, but mockery won’t save you, squishy meat.” Clea snatched them from him with a trembling hand, and abruptly ran out of anger steam. It was hard to stay angry at someone who she could be spending the next year with - something she was, unwillingly, coming to accept - and who was Thousand’s friend. She let out a long, quiet sigh.
“I’m sorry for yelling,” she said weakly. “I don’t like what’s been happening. It’s really difficult to deal with, but I’m sorry I took it out on you.” Fox gave her a long look.
“You are an incredible doormat,” he said.
“Sorry,” she mumbled. He hit himself in the forehead with the heel of his palm and muttered something that sounded like, “thicker than a tank of lard on a cold day,” and she pretended not to hear it.
“Are you going to get some food?” she said. “I know you don’t need to eat, but the food here is nice. The beef rendang is really good.”
“These places don’t have any sense of hygiene,” he said. “I’ll get cholera.”
“You can watch the food being prepared.” She tapped the dashboard. “Coming?”
Eventually, he did. She coaxed him into the café on the condition that they took a seat near the kitchen and in clear view of the car - “in case of saboteurs or possessive spirits”, he said. She tried not to argue. And tried not to sympathise as he carefully selected the cleanest-looking chair from a stack of seven.
“The menu’s over there,” she said, pointing to the opposite wall. Sheets of paper with various names of dishes scrawled across them had been taped up. “What did you want?”
“I can’t read it,” he said.
“Maybe if you took off your sunglasses?” she said, as gently as she could.
“No.” He shoved them more firmly onto his face, as though trying to prove her wrong. “I need them. The sunlight will burn my eyes. I still can’t read it with the sunglasses off, by the way.”
“Oh.” She paused. “You need glasses?”
“I don’t need glasses. I can see just fine when I’m not meat.” His lower lip tightened. “A fox with glasses would look ridiculous.” Clea pictured it, and giggled.
“It’s not funny,” he hissed. She subsided into smiling, but the image was persistent and adorable.
“Aren’t you hot?” she said a moment later, as he jerked out of the way when the sun appeared from behind a cloud. Mummified as he was in that horrible, horrible trenchcoat, she couldn’t see why he was worrying too much. The only thing he looked likely to die from was heatstroke.
“No,” he said stiffly. “If I take the trenchcoat off I’ll be struck by fire and catch skin cancer.”
“Oh,” she said, and then ‘oh’ again, longer this time. “Okay.” To save herself from having to make potentially embarrassing comments along the lines of ‘you’re an albino’, she unfolded one of the maps.
“I was thinking that we could maybe head to Pulau Tioman,” she said, talking to the table, “In case my animal’s a sea-spirit. I’ve heard that islands are the best places. And my mother told me there was a bomoh in Kuala Rompin, which is on the way.”
There was a long uncomfortable silence. She darted a look at him from behind her fringe.
“An island,” he said flatly. “I assume we’re going to take a boat.”
“Yes,” she said.
“We’ll drown,” he said. “I’m not on good terms with the sea-spirits. I’d prefer not to.”
“We won’t drown, we’ll take the ferry,” she said.
“You say it like one excludes the other.” The drinks arrived; she pushed the teapot to him and fastened onto the iced Coke with predatory speed. Coke was forbidden in her mother’s house. All soft-drinks were. Her only chances to sneak any were when she went out with friends, and woe betide her if she brought any back. Cordelia did tend to get away with the occasional Japanese drink by claiming it was iced tea, but Clea doubted she’d get such leeway from her mother.
Her eyes slid to Fox, who was glaring at her drink like it had committed a mortal offence.
“Coke?” He sounded ready to have a heart attack; only one ignore away from frothing at the mouth. “That is made out of acids and chemicals. It’s going to dissolve your stomach walls.”
“That’s an urban legend, you know,” she said out of the corner of her mouth, teeth still fastened on the straw.
“It’s going to upset the acid balance in your stomach and devour all of your entrails,” he said without missing a beat. “It also leaves you more open to demonic possession.” Clea paused mid-sip.
“Really?” she said.
“No,” he said, “even demons won’t touch that filth. And we’re not going to this island place. Isn’t there somewhere on the mainland where you can commune with the sea-spirits?”
“Why don’t you use your power?” she said. “Or knowledge? Ask it if the ferry is safe.”
Fox gave her a long, long glare. She held her ground, but the nervous turning of the glass between her hands was probably a tell - it was hard facing those flat red eyes. Then he shoved his chair back with a faint plastic-on-tile grate and trod off to the nearest tree, sitting lonely in a small circle of dirt surrounded by cracked cement.
“We’ll be back,” she told the waiter, who was watching them bemusedly, and hurried after Fox.
By the time she’d reached he had dusted off a short stick and handed it gingerly to her. She accepted it, equally gingerly.
“Make sixteen lines of dots in the dirt,” he said. “Don’t count the dots. Make them long as you can before you get sick of it.” She did, and blinked as she started crossing them off. Pair by pair, until either one or two remained; quickly, she sketched a geometric pattern of triangles and boxes in the dirt and began arranging the dots in groups, apparently at random - two, one, one, one. In the next triangle - one, two, two, two. Over her shoulder, she glanced at Fox. His lips were thin and tight.
“You learn fast,” he said.
“Thousand said the same thing,” she said cautiously. He sniffed.
“Do you know how to read it?” He knelt down beside her, carefully not touching anything. It was about then, when the two of them were huddled together staring at the dirt, that she realised he had exquisitely nice shoes. Point-toed. Neat, carefully-stitched seams. Smooth, un-scuffed leather. They had a glow that said money. They were much nicer than his trenchcoat; they were something Thousand would wear, except she had only had the opportunity to see Thousand’s shoes twice and both times they had been American canvas sneakers. Why on earth he was wearing such an ugly trenchcoat when he had such good-looking shoes escaped her. It almost made her wonder what he wore under the trenchcoat.
“First-” She tore her eyes away from his nice, nice shoes and continued arranging the dots. These two add up, she thought, so that makes this shape - and she continued to make the strange little figures. Finally, all the boxes were filled. “No - maybe.” She squinted, and then slumped. “No.”
“This one is the judge,” he said, pointing at the last figure. “Good judge. These two,” he pointed at the two above it, “are the witnesses. Bad witnesses. It means that you’ll succeed after some trouble.” He squinted - she thought he was squinting, anyway, not that she could tell with the sunglasses. “Do another spread. This is for staying on the mainland.” She did another sixteen rows of dots.
The first figure - one dot, one, one, two - formed, and he caught her wrist.
“Al-'ataba al-kharidj,” he said, sounding bitter. “Fine. We’ll go to the damn island,” and with that he stood up and started to trudge back to the café. “Don’t leave the stick behind! And erase the reading!” Cautiously, Clea balanced on one stilettoed foot and brushed dirt over the diagrams. She took a moment to stare at the stick. It looked unremarkable. She dusted it off anyway, and followed quickly after Fox.
“That’s very bad?” she said, catching up.
“If that’s the first figure, stop the reading,” he said.
“Okay,” she said. Their food had arrived, and all the ice in her Coke had melted.
After lunch they drove, an uneventful drive along flat highways edged by palm oil plantations, punctuated by the occasional rock quarry. Most of the highways appeared to have been punched directly through mountains; for at least a quarter of the way they were edged on both sides by marbled strata, pinkish-red and white and orange. Apart from the occasional tollbooth - “Invented by demons.”
“I knew it!”
“It was sarcasm, squishy meat.” - the road was empty of all other human beings, which made her pull over at least once to bawl helplessly while Fox climbed out of the car and huddled in the meagre shade of a scrawny saga tree to keep from getting whatever she had.
“Homesickness isn’t contagious, you know,” she said to him later, voice cracked. At least her makeup had already been cleaned off. It saved her the trouble of mopping off her mascara.
“I’m not taking any chances,” he growled, climbing back in. “Did you move my seat?”
“No,” she said. “Nothing else did either, okay? I’ve been watching. If you really want to check you can shove your hand under the seat and risk the beartrap I put under there to keep gremlins from interfering.”
She seemed to be good at the sarcasm thing when she was upset, she thought.
Fox eventually fell into a restless doze, which he jerked out of occasionally to snap at her to slow down. They arrived in Mersing that night and she promptly made a beeline for the four-star side of town, all glittering lights and faux-waterfall fountains and even valets in neat vests despite the heat.
On their way through the suburbs, she thought she glimpsed a blue-gated house - she nearly slowed down to gape at it, earning her a loud honking from the car behind her. Fox did not wake up. Apparently he only offered unwanted advice when it was unnecessary. The blue-gated house turned out to be just a regular house, when she subjected it to the corner-of-the-eyes test, and so she headed for the big, glittering Mariott, whose neon logo beckoned.
“That one.” A black-gloved hand shot into her vision, and she squeaked and nearly swerved the car into a ditch.
“What was that?” growled Fox, ten seconds later, when he had dared to emerge from behind his hat. “Can you drive?”
“Not when you do this-” She demonstrated. “-while I’m driving!”
“Don’t take your hands off the wheel!” If he hadn’t been pale, she was sure he would have gone the same colour. For a few seconds all she could hear from him was loud, quick breathing, and then he slowly eased his grip off the dashboard. “That hotel. There. Go to it.”
Fairly sure he was on the verge of a heart attack, she did. It was large, and fancy, and looked like more than she was willing to afford as they pulled into the marble-pillared lobby. Fox tumbled out of the car with, she noted, shaky legs and more than a fair share of muttered insults.
“Go in,” he said, leaning on the car as though his knees were about to fold in. “You have a reservation under Su Bai Ren. Sign for it, pay on your card.”
“My name isn’t Su Bai Ren,” she said.
“I know, alright? I’ll take care of it. Get in there and lie like you’d lie to a priest.” Faced with Fox’s impenetrable logic, she did. Someone opened the door for her and she sidled in like she belonged.
The receptionist didn’t seem to pick up on the slight guilt, which gave her enough confidence to attempt the next part.
“I’ve got a reservation,” she said.
“What’s your name?”
“Su Bai Ren.” She nearly stumbled over the lie. “Here’s my card.” The receptionist scanned it, nodded and handed her a pen. Clea paused. Did she sign like herself, or like Miss Su should sign? In the end she opted for her own signature, and the receptionist made absolutely no comment for a second, leaving Clea nervously shifting from foot to foot and wondering if she was going to be surrounded by police at any second.
“That looks fine, Miss Su,” said the receptionist, startling Clea out of the mental image of her mother bailing her out of jail. “Here’s your room keys. You’re on the sixth floor.”
“Oh,” Clea said. “Thank you. Thank you very much.” With that, she escaped out into the sweaty evening heat, to where Fox was waiting.
“How did you do that?” she whispered, drawing level with him.
“You did,” he said. “Don’t ask me.” Clea stared.
“I thought you were taking care of it,” she said.
“And you trusted me, squishy meat,” he said darkly, pulling a duffel bag out of the backseat that she was sure hadn’t been there when she’d met him. “It worked. Maybe you’re magical.”
“That wasn’t your power?” she said numbly. “You didn’t-”
“Illusions will destroy my life energy and have a good chance of causing me nerve paralysis.” He shuddered. “The last time an illusion found me I was unconscious for two months. It was probably invading my system and using my organs to fuel its reproductive cycle.”
“I’m going to park the car,” she said, because there was really nothing else she could say. “Here’s your room key.” He nearly dropped it when she handed it to him, hissing, “Magnets! Do you know what those can do?”
“Open your hotel room?” she said, getting into the car. “I have no idea how you can make up entire lists of fake symptoms for everything but you can’t explain how I just got away with identity fraud, by the way.”
Fox eyeballed her, then turned and started warily for the hotel. He waited a long time on the nature strip for cars that never came; when he seemed to have convinced himself that he was safe, he scrambled across, his black trenchcoat flapping. A black trenchcoat, no matter how ugly, somehow managed to make a lot of things look dignified, she thought. If they hadn’t been ridiculously impractical she would have thought about getting one.
That night she was asleep almost the moment her head hit the pillow. In between the crying, the running and the mysterious powers, the day had taken a lot out of her. Fox, to her relief, was in an adjacent room - the thought of arguing with him over the ability of an electric lamp to make him blind was frighteningly realistic.
Briefly after that she blinked, and blinked again, aware of a faint light just above her. She looked up. It was a small, plasticky spotlight, just like the sort in airplanes. She looked to one side - across an aisle were a row of deep, comfortable seats, occupied by people to various degrees of ‘awake’. A small boy was playing some game on a lit TV screen in the seat in front of him.
She looked to the other side.
“Hello,” Thousand said, raising a sleeping mask. “I was afraid you wouldn’t make it.”
“Thousand,” she said, and relaxed. “Hi.”
“You seem to be alright,” he said. “Not dead yet, which is always excellent. Are you alright?”
“Not really.” Clea shifted in her seat. “I’ve had to leave home.”
“Oh,” he said sympathetically. “I’m very sorry. Searching for a new spirit guide, I presume?” She nodded. “The great journey. Your parents each took theirs. I suppose it would be a shame if you had to miss out on this, but it is a bit unfortunate that it had to happen like this.” He sighed. “Still, you’ll do well. How has it been?”
Clea told him - about the house, Fox, strange powers she didn’t remember acquiring - and he nodded and listened and chuckled a little when she talked about Fox.
“Fox is terrible,” he said, “but excellent help. Just don’t argue with his paranoia and you’ll be fine. It mostly only affects him.” He sighed and stared into space for a moment, as if recalling something, then turned back to her. “So you’re going to this island?”
“Yes,” she said. “Where are you going?”
“This plane?” He tapped the window. “The United States. There’s something I’ll need to do there. Hopefully, I’ll be able to bring you too.”
“That would be nice,” she said, nodding. “Which part?”
“Colorado,” he said. “Lovely mountains.” Thousand paused. “Clea, Fox is only a temporary solution. Don’t get too attached to his power.”
“His power - the divining?” Clea sat up. “What about the illusions?”
“The illusions,” he sighed. “Those may just be your powers manifesting. Presumably they’ll get stronger as you get closer to your spirit. I’m just speculating, though. There might be another explanation.”
“It would be a really good power to have if I could control it,” she said slowly. Thousand smiled.
“So much potential for no good,” he said cheerfully. “Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll get a hold on things. Wake up, Clea. It’s nearly breakfast time.” The world melted.
She yawned and stretched awake, the muscles in her back straightening and tightening, and flopped out of bed. The carpet was wonderfully soft beneath her toes. She sat there staring blankly at it for a moment, then plodded out to the balcony. Mersing in the morning was like suburban Kuala Lumpur: she could hear the morning calls from the mosque and the rumble of morning traffic, not yet at its peak. From above everything was pleasantly alien. She looked down. She looked again. Then she ran back inside, sped out the door and hammered on the neighbouring door.
“Fox,” she said, her voice about two octaves higher and three times louder. “Fox!” The door swung open under her knuckles the next time she knocked, and he blinked down at her.
“What?” he said, gravelly-voiced, and stumbled in squinting as she shoved past him.
“Look,” she said, voice shaking, “Out the balcony.” He followed her out. Not before snatching up his sunglasses and hat, however. She wondered, briefly, if he ever washed his hair. “There!”
“What-” He staggered out, tossing a towel over his bare shoulders. About six stories down, just behind the hotel, was a familiar blue-roofed, blue-gated house. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the possessive trunk curling over the rooftiles, rustling at her.
“That house is following us,” she said, and her voice broke on the last syllable.
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Word count so far: 15960!