Chapter 20

"You said my name. Twice."

Of all the things to have come out of her mouth while she was under. And to him.

Ning Shu looked at Lu Zheng's face, which was plainly working hard at being calm, and she came apart a little.

"I must have heard somebody say it," Ning Shu made herself explain. "I wasn't clear in the head at all."

Lu Zheng said, "Nobody there said it."

Ning Shu looked at that unreadable little smile and decided to leave the subject exactly where it was.

"You're still very young. What you want to be thinking about is growing up happily." Ning Shu patted his shoulder. "Keep yourself healthy in body and mind."

Lu Zheng turned his face slightly and looked down at her hand on his left shoulder.

Ning Shu pulled it back fast and put it behind her and coughed lightly. "I'm going. My grandmother will be looking for me."

"Are you really a fortune-teller?" Lu Zheng called after her. "My family have had a great many feng shui masters in. Some from Hong Kong, some from Thailand."

Ning Shu thought, your family is one of the great houses of Jiangcheng, and the richer people are the harder they hold on to their money and the more they believe in fate, so of course they would be dealing with that sort.

"Once I've learned what my grandmother knows, I'll…" Ning Shu had not finished when Lu Zheng caught her by the arm and pulled her out of the way.

A doctor and a nurse came past down the corridor at a run with an emergency patient on a trolley, and it went through the space where she had been standing.

"Careful."

Ning Shu let her breath out. She had not seen it coming at all.

Lu Zheng let go of her and turned away and rubbed the side of his nose. "Watch where you stand."

"Right. I'm going."

"Wait." Lu Zheng called her back. "You're from the country."

"Oi."

"Have you ever had chocolate?"

"…"

Ning Shu said, with a perfectly straight face, "Country people have never had chocolate."

Lu Zheng laughed a little and took a gold-wrapped Ferrero out of his bag and held it out to her. "It's very good."

Ning Shu looked at that gold ball and wanted to pinch his face. How could the small Lu Zheng be this guileless?

She knew the grown Lu Zheng loved sweet things, nearly past sense about them. Ning Shu had rather envied him at times. He could eat whatever he liked and never put on an ounce.

She took the Ferrero out of his hand and smiled. "Country person's first chocolate. Thanks."

"No need. If you want more, ring me and I'll have some sent." Lu Zheng took a slip of paper out of his bag and gave it to her.

Ning Shu took it and put it in her bag. "All right."

After Lu Zheng had gone, Ning Shu looked at the clean white slip with the phone number on it, and something sad moved in her.

What was going to happen to him over the next few years to turn him into the man she had known?

Selfish, cruel, mad, and no line he would not cross.

She passed the turn of the corridor, and the white slip went lightly into the bin.

---

Ning Shu dreamed about Lu Zheng again, and this time there were two of them. One had his hand round her throat so that she could not breathe. The other was peeling the foil off a Ferrero, perfectly calm about it, while the first one went on throttling her.

When Ning Shu woke up her heart was going hard.

Two of him. As if one had not been enough in the last life.

Ning Shu turned over to get back to sleep, and half awake she noticed that the quilt on the other bed had been thrown back, and the bed was empty.

Her grandmother was gone.

Ning Shu hit the switch on the bedside lamp and the room came up bright, and sure enough, her grandmother was gone.

She got out of bed in a hurry, ran to Gouwa's bed and shook him. "Wake up, Gouzi."

Gouwa rubbed his eyes, cross about being pulled out of a good dream, and grumbled, "What."

"Have you seen Grandma? She's gone."

"Mm, Granny's at home."

"Not your mother's mother. Mine. Your father's mother." Ning Shu slapped at his face. "Wake up."

Gouwa seemed to come round a bit, though his eyes were still half shut, and he mumbled, "Grandma went out."

"Where?"

"Said the paper men had found the bad man, and she went off after them."

"Why didn't you stop her, or wake me? How could you let her go alone?" Ning Shu was frantic.

Gouwa only said vaguely, "I saw her go into a house as well. A really run-down house. Worse than ours."

Ning Shu did not know what to do with that. "You're dreaming."

Gouwa blinked a few times and then said, "Ah, I think I was dreaming. I dreamed Grandma went off with the paper men."

Ning Shu said, "…So you don't know where she's gone either."

She wanted to ring her grandmother and remembered she had never been in the habit of carrying a phone. She was on her way out to the next room to wake her uncle and aunt, and as she passed the door she saw a thin paper man lying by the frame.

Ning Shu picked it up and turned round, startled. Gouwa was sitting half up at the edge of the bed, dozing again.

She put the paper man on the bedside cabinet and asked him, "In the dream, you saw Grandma go off with the paper men?"

Gouwa opened his eyes, full of sleep. "Forgot."

The paper man lay quietly on the cabinet.

A cleaner came through the ward every evening. Where had this thing come from out of thin air? Unless what Gouwa had seen in the dream had actually happened.

Had her grandmother really gone after that Daoist with the paper men?

It was not impossible. Her grandmother worked alone. If word had come she might well not have told any of them, because none of them could have been any help to her.

And that Daoist did not look like an easy man.

Ning Shu could not let her grandmother go off alone like that. She picked the paper man up and said, "I'll have a go at this scattering paper into soldiers myself."

That woke Gouwa up completely, and his eyes went round. "Eh?"

Ning Shu copied what her grandmother had done, took hold of the paper man and threw him on the floor.

The paper man did not come alive. He drifted down and lay there and did not move.

So it was no use after all.

Which was fair enough. A charm that calls soldiers down out of the sky can hardly be something anybody picks up in a minute, or it would not be a charm.

"Sis, Grandma said something over them, didn't she? Why don't you try saying it too?" Gouwa said.

That reminded her. Her grandmother had said a charm, and when Ning Shu thought back she found she remembered the words.

Never mind. Nothing to lose by trying.

Ning Shu picked the paper man up again, put her first and middle fingers together and said, under her breath:

Burn money till it melts the rivers and the sea, let the fine light come out and open up the sky. Soul-taking masters, come down the golden stair, gods and generals, come down out of the cloud.

The paper man went down again and lay there as still as before.

"…"

Ning Shu waited two minutes and then got up. "Never mind. I'll fetch my uncle and we'll go and look for her together."

Ning Shu went out of the door with Gouwa behind her, and as he was going he could not help glancing back at the paper man. It seemed to have moved, though that might have been his eyes.

Gouwa started to turn away, and the paper man on the floor flipped himself up and sat straight.

---

Ning Shu thought this world had got genuinely out of hand. She had been sent back into her own childhood for no reason she could name and had two ghost children trailing after her, and all right, fine.

But now, in the middle of the night, she and Gouwa were pelting down an empty street one behind the other, chasing a small paper man for all they were worth. Nobody would believe her if she told them.

Ning Shu was out of breath. She looked back and Gouwa had given out long ago and was propped on his knees. "What is that thing? How can it run like that? It's faster than Liu Xiang. Put it in the Olympics and it'd take gold for the country."

He still had the wind to be funny.

Ning Shu turned back and a car came round the corner of the street ahead.

"Look out!"

Before the words were out the car went straight over the paper man.

Ning Shu and Gouwa ran over. The paper man was lying flat in the middle of the road, a sorry sight, squashed into a pancake with one leg off.

Even so, a few minutes later he got himself up again and limped on, hopping, in the same direction.

Ning Shu put a thumb up at him. "Hard as nails."

She patted Gouwa's slack-jawed head. "Learn from him. That's what sticking to your job looks like."

There was a public yellow bicycle at the kerb, so Ning Shu got on it with Gouwa behind her and caught the paper man up.

The paper man went into a narrow dark lane, nothing in it but half-finished buildings from the eighties, with everything run down.

At every crossing he stopped for a few seconds, as though working out which way to go.

Ning Shu rode behind him with Gouwa on the back.

Gouwa looked at the half-built blocks around them and said shakily, "Sis, why does this feel so familiar?"

Ning Shu was half dead from pedalling him about and could not be bothered to answer, and Gouwa went on, "I feel as if I've been here before."

"I've got it." He smacked his own head. "I dreamed about this just now. It's exactly the same as in my dream."

Gouwa chattered on. "Up ahead. There's a three-storey old red house up ahead, and Grandma went into the red house."

Ning Shu followed the paper man and turned the handlebars, and sure enough there was an old red three-storey house straight in front of them. The outside of it had been let go for so long that the colour was hard to make out, with only a trace of dark red showing through.

"Not bad, Gouwa." Ning Shu stopped and leaned the bicycle against the wall. "You can follow Grandma about in your sleep now?"

Gouwa was baffled and rubbed his head. "I don't know what's going on either."

"Then do you know which floor she's on and what the number is?"

Gouwa shook his head. "I only dreamed this far. Then you woke me up."

"I really should have let you sleep."

By now the paper man had got himself smartly to the door of the red house and was waving them on.

Ning Shu watched that one thin sheet of a body putting on the airs of a man leading a party, and found it rather good.

"There's no knowing what's up there. Gouwa, you stay down here. Don't come up."

"Certainly not." Gouwa objected at once. "That's exactly like waking me up in the middle of a dream. It isn't decent."

"What if I did wake you up? It wasn't a good dream."

"What counts as a good dream, then?"

"Mm." Ning Shu thought of the dream with the two Lu Zhengs in it, and decided she would rather not have had that one either.

"Sis, why have you pulled that face?"

"What business is that of yours at your age." Ning Shu said, "I'm the older one. I say you stay here. No arguing. Arguing doesn't work."

Gouwa blew his cheeks out, and then did as he was told and stood at the door. Ning Shu went up after the paper man. The stairs were old concrete and the stairwell still smelled of the mould of decades, and Ning Shu went up carefully behind him.

The lights in the stairwell were dim and swimming and barely better than nothing.

The paper man stopped outside the room at the end of the third-floor corridor. In the dim light Ning Shu could see that the door of it seemed to be open, and wind kept coming out of the room, banging the door against the frame, open and shut and open again.

Gouwa's voice came from beside her. "Mother of God. There's a wind machine in there."

Ning Shu turned round, cross. "Didn't I tell you not to come up? It's dangerous."

Gouwa argued anyway. "I think I've got to finish this dream, or I'll keep thinking about it later and never sleep."

"…" What kind of reason was that.

Ning Shu pulled him behind her. "Then stay with me and don't go wandering."

"Right you are."

Ning Shu went down to the end of the corridor with the paper man going ahead to look. He had barely come near the door when his thin little body went to pieces, as though there were blades in that wind that nobody could see, cutting him up.

"Look out!" Ning Shu got Gouwa behind her and pulled him sideways hard. Several long cracks opened in the wall opposite.

"God above, what are they doing in there?"

Ning Shu kept to the wall and worked her way along to the room.

There was nobody in it. Only furniture thrown about, and what looked like the marks of a fight.

Gouwa got his head round the frame and peered in. "Nothing here. Where's Grandma?"

Ning Shu made a sign at him to be quiet and looked round the room, and found a small door by the wall, half open. She went quietly over to it and looked in, and the moment the door moved a cold came out that went through to the bone. Ning Shu shivered and told Gouwa, "You stand here. Don't come down."

Before Gouwa could answer she thought again and said, "No, come with me. I don't like leaving you here either."

Gouwa was not frightened in the least. If anything he was excited, as though this were an adventure.

Ning Shu kept a tight hold of his hand. "Stay close."

"All right. It's a dream anyway. What's the worst that can happen."

Ning Shu looked back at him. So he still thought he was dreaming.

Never mind. Let him go on thinking it.

Beyond the door it was dark, with two faint red lights, and above them was a god on a seat, something like the Heavenly Master's seat at her grandmother's house.

Only the figure was different. The Heavenly Master Huang bared his teeth with his claws up and had a terrible face. This one was smiling, with a kind look about the brows and eyes.

Beside the seat there was an instrument set out as an offering. Ning Shu had seen it in the book her grandmother gave her. It was called a demon-subduing staff, with the hells of the asuras worked along it, and a still light moving over the surface. At the head of it were four faces, and the four of them wore joy, anger, grief and delight.

Then the cackling started behind her, and Ning Shu turned and saw the ghost baby lying on a bed, laughing wildly at her.

"Sis! I can hear footsteps." Gouwa was at the door looking out. "I think Grandma and that Daoist are fighting."

"Wow! Grandma's incredible. She's made him cough blood."

Ning Shu looked at how pleased with himself he was. He really did think he was dreaming, and if she broke the dream open, with the nerve he had, he would be frightened out of his skin.

The baby in front of her laughed harder, with nothing holding it back.

"Sis, what are you waiting about for? Kill the ghost baby." Gouwa hurried her along. "Grandma can't hold out much longer."

Ning Shu rolled her eyes. "You really do think you're in a dream."

She put her hand round the baby's throat.

She knew the thing in front of her was not a real baby, and even so she could not quite make herself do it. She had never killed anybody.

No. This was not a person. It was a demon.

And then the baby seemed to feel the threat and opened its mouth wide and showed those sharp, hideous teeth.

Good. A minute ago she could not make herself do it. Now it had stopped looking like a baby, and she could.

Ning Shu put her fingers into it and throttled it in earnest.

And the baby only laughed worse, as though she were tickling it.

Gouwa was peering round the door. "Oh dear, the old Daoist's seen us. He's coming. Sis, have you killed it yet?"

"It can't be killed." However hard Ning Shu worked at it, she could not kill it.

"Sis, are you stupid? What are you killing it with your hands for? It's a monster. Haven't you watched Journey to the West? Who ever killed a monster with their hands?"

So now Gouwa was telling her how to do it.

Though she had to admit the boy had a point. Trying to throttle a ghost baby with her bare hands had been as stupid as anything she had ever done.

Her eye went to the demon-subduing staff. Of course. It subdued demons. That was what it was for.

"Gouwa, get me that staff."

Gouwa came thundering over. "What's a staff?"

"The iron rod by the wall."

"Oh. Got it." Gouwa ran over, and a moment later he called, "Sis, I can't lift it. It's too heavy."

"Useless." Ning Shu let the demon baby go and ran over to take the staff herself, and the thing might have put down roots into the stand. It did not shift a hair.

"God. What's it made of, to weigh that much?"

The staff was pure black with that still light moving over it, and there was no telling what it was made of. It looked a little like obsidian, and no obsidian ever weighed that much.

Just then somebody kicked the door open, and the Daoist came in with a sword in his hand, in a bad way.

Her grandmother had hurt him badly. The front of his robe was soaked through with blood. The sight of Ning Shu changed his face, and he came at her with the sword up and murder in him.

Gouwa was nearest to him, and he had watched too many films about heroes, and wanted to be the lead in his own dream for once, so he put both arms out in front of the Daoist. "You're not touching my sister."

Ning Shu swore at him under her breath and ran and got him into her arms.

The Daoist brought the long sword down at the top of Ning Shu's head and shouted, "Stand in my way and die!"

Ning Shu shut her eyes tight, and in those last few seconds a few pictures went through her head, and one of them was Lu Zheng.

Lu Zheng smiling at her.

That was something.

The pain did not come, though it was possible the Daoist was good enough that she had gone before she could feel it.

Not like the last life, going down the stairs and breaking every bone she had, with the blow that finished her at the back of her head, and not one part of her left whole. She could still remember how that hurt.

Ning Shu opened her eyes a little, and it gave her a shock.

The blade had stopped a few centimetres above the crown of her head.

Ning Tuanzi stood in front of her, and he had caught the sword between his two palms.