Curse of the Pogo Stick

The Shaman’s Maiden Flight

Night had already enveloped the village and the evening meal sat undigested in Dr. Siri’s gut. There was only so much pork a man could eat. Still aching from his run-in with Moo’er, he sat in the shaman’s hut with General Bao undergoing a crash course in how to conduct an exorcism. He’d attended them before but seeing was by no means the same as doing. He’d once seen a man twirl plates on the end of cane rods but he’d broken four when he tried it himself. Pretending to be a shaman wasn’t going to be any easier. And pretend was all it could be. Siri and Bao had decided it was the least he could do for his host. Just provide a little hope, go through the motions, say, “Sorry, Long, I did my best” and go home.

But that wasn’t Dr. Siri Paiboun. Deceit and trickery didn’t sit well on his conscience. He had to do more than that. Earlier, while he’d sat on a boulder waiting for his supper, the sun slowly easing its way over the mountains, he’d engaged himself in a little lateral thinking like his literary hero Inspector Maigret. There was no doubt the area around the house was out of alignment. His talisman told him that much. His aching muscles told him it was something he needed to be afraid of. But his head told him the situation was not as impossible as it seemed. By the time he’d joined the others for dinner, he had a Plan B.

But first he had to get through Plan A. Fortunately, Bao had assisted her father on so many occasions she knew the ceremonies by heart and was a patient teacher for Siri. He’d written the various stages of the exorcism on a small cheat sheet and committed some of the more important phrases to memory. He was just about to attempt a full dress rehearsal when they were disturbed by the splutter of tired ponies from outside. The search party had returned.

Siri and Bao hurried outside just as Long and the others emerged from the main house. Dia and Chia were seated on the same horse and behind them, strapped facedown on the second pony, was a rather feral-looking Judge Haeng. He was barely conscious. While the girls unstrapped him Siri looked into his milky eyes and found a weak pulse.

“Did you give him anything to drink?” Siri asked.

“He wouldn’t take it from us, Yeh Ming,” Chia told him.

“Or food,” Dia added. “He just screamed and fainted. Will he live, do you think?”

“I’ll be able to get a better look when we get him down from his mount, but I don’t see too many problems a little nutrition won’t fix. You are excellent trackers. Well done. My heartiest thanks.”

As they helped the judge down, Siri did detect a broken wrist. The fact that there was no cry of pain when Siri grabbed it suggested Haeng had no feeling. The numbness extended to his head. In his stupor he mumbled phrases like, “What will become of me?” and “The Lord Buddha protect me,” a plea Siri filed away for some blackmail in the future. Although Long wanted the newcomer to recover in the main house, Siri decided a room to himself would be less traumatic for Haeng if and when he came around. He made up some excuse about the possibility of contagion and they opened up the hut nearest to Siri’s own and made it comfortable.

A broken wrist, a lost toenail, several deep lacerations probably caused by running into trees, bruises, a slight fever as a result of malnutrition, and a bad case of poison ivy. But, against all the odds, Judge Haeng would live to tell the tale. Bao looked at his well-manicured fingernails and soft hands.

“He isn’t your assistant, is he, Yeh Ming?”

“In fact, he’s my chief,” Siri confessed.

“But… but he’s much younger than you.”

“That’s the marvelous thing about communism, Bao. Equal opportunity. Even a man without experience has the chance to run a department.”

“It’s a silly system.”

“I’ll pass on your views to the prime minister next time I see him.” He tightened a splint and wiped the dribbled water from his patient’s chin. “Now, don’t I have some rehearsals to complete?”

They walked slowly to the shaman’s house but Bao stopped outside.

“It isn’t really equal, is it, Yeh Ming?”

“What’s that?”

“Communism. I mean, will the government really give a share of their power to the Hmong who fought with them against us? Will they give them good jobs and high positions in the army? There are still the little mice and the big elephants, aren’t there?”

“Yes, my general. There are still mice and elephants. But don’t forget the elephants used to be mice, so keep eating your spinach.”

It was the morning of the exorcism and everyone but Siri, his patient, and, presumably, the honeymoon couple up on the hill, had gone to the fields. Hmong New Year was a day away and they needed to get the opium tapped beforehand. As in most Hmong communities, opium was a source of medicine and revenue. Only the old bothered to smoke it. It was easy to carry in nuggets and would be their currency on the long journey they faced.

Siri had risen to check the progress of Judge Haeng twice during the night. On the second visit the patient allowed himself to be lifted to a sitting position and was able to swallow a large volume of sugared water. For breakfast, Siri spooned a gruel of pork and rice between the judge’s cracked lips. Siri imagined him out there in the jungle not trusting any plant or fruit. Not knowing which roots were safe to eat or which insects gave the most nutrition. He was still delirious but once or twice his eyes wandered into the flight path of Siri’s and he smiled. A miracle of sorts.

Siri couldn’t begin to imagine how he’d be able to explain all this once the little judge had regained control of his faculties. With luck he’d remain non compos mentis until it was all over and the Hmong were on their way. Siri walked outside with his cup of coffee freshly brewed from beans he’d crushed himself. He marveled once again at the spectacular scenery all around. How would the Hmong be able to live without it? What had they done that was so terrible to deserve banishment to an alien land? They’d lost the war, so what? Laos had forever engaged in battles with itself. “Forgive thine enemy,” the Christian Bible said. Too bad the Manifesto didn’t include that clause.

The final check: on the three-tiered altar sat the silver alms bowl full of spring water, a pork-fat candle, a saucer of husked rice with a complete egg as its centerpiece, and three porcelain bowls of rice wine, tea, and water to satisfy the finicky tastes of the spirits. In his pouch were the divination horns and puffed maize for his horse, the winged steed that would carry the shaman to the Otherworld. Yet right now that particular beast resembled nothing more than a wonky wooden bench with splinters.

Several threads of pure white unspun cotton ran from the altar over the main crossbeam and down to the frame of the door, giving the guests the feeling they were entering the lair of a giant spider. Siri himself was decked out in black pajamas. Around his head was a macramйd band that held a hooded mask in place. It was pulled back over his head at present but would be lowered when the ceremony began. On the fingers of his right hand were tiny bells that made him sound like a wind chime whenever he tried to scratch his missing earlobe. On the bench were his dagger and rattle. He could hear the audience milling around outside.

“Are you nervous?” Bao asked him.

“Nervous? Me? Dr. Siri Paiboun, the national coroner with a lifetime membership in the communist party? Are you serious? I’m scared witless. I never was much for costume drama. I got terrible stage fright at high school in Paris when they forced me to act. Did I tell you I went to high school in France? They made me repeat everything from eighth grade before they’d let me study medicine. It didn’t help that all the costumes were twice my size. I was five years older than everyone else and half as big. They made me look like a little boy playing dress up. I’ll never forget-I’m babbling, aren’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Sure sign the adrenaline’s pumping.”

They heard the excited chatter of the audience coming to the door.

“Oh, my word,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it, Yeh Ming. Just go through it the way we did last night. They’ll never know.”

He looked into her sparkling eyes.

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen. Why?”

“I sometimes get the feeling you’re an old person reincarnated.”

“Old people aren’t necessarily that smart, Yeh Ming.”

“Touchй.”

Siri sat carefully on the winged steed. He nodded solemnly first at Elder Long, who was wearing his best suit for the occasion, then at his three wives. Each was attempting to outdress the others. Their costumes were evidence of many years of work and great depth of artistic feeling. He smiled at the unattached ladies and waited for them to sit cross-legged in front of their elder’s seat. The room was full and Siri thanked the stars that two hundred more guests hadn’t been able to make it to the ceremony.

There came an almighty crash that almost bucked him from his horse. It was Bao bringing the house to order with her gong. Siri took a deep breath to restart his heart. Once his assistant had the audience’s attention she began to beat the instrument steadily, two heartbeats per gong. Siri composed himself, picked up the ceremonial dagger, and walked to the altar. With a rather impressive flourish, he buried the knife almost to its hilt in the dirt floor. So far, so good. He lit the incense and the foul-smelling candle and returned to the bench. He reached into his pouch and produced the divination horns. These had been cut from the tip of a buffalo horn and split lengthwise to make two similar halves. How the horns landed when cast onto the ground would tell the shaman what particular ailment the elder’s daughter was suffering from (although Siri hardly needed horns to tell him that) and how best to go about healing her. He cupped both hands around them, shook them extravagantly like a gambler in Monte Carlo, and threw them onto the ground at his feet.

There was a gasp from the onlookers. Something had gone wrong already. One of the horns had cracked in half down its axis, leaving not two but three divining markers. The newly split horn formed a perfect cross. The unbroken horn landed horizontally beside it. It was symmetrical. No casino would have given odds on it. Siri had no idea what it meant. He was angry he’d shaken the horns too hard but he pretended it was all perfectly normal. He leaned down to study the formation and nodded knowingly. Once satisfied he sat square on the bench and breathed heavily.

This was to be the point at which Bao would lower the hood, but Siri happened to look up at that moment to see a delirious but conscious Judge Haeng leaning against the door frame wearing nothing but a splint and a pair of underpants. He glared drunkenly around the room and seemed to recognize one Dr. Siri dressed as a Hmong and riding a wooden horse. Siri shrugged and let the flap drop over his face. One crisis at a time. The show had to go on.

The actual process of getting a shaman into a trance could have taken an hour or more, but he and Bao had decided fifteen minutes would be sufficient in this particular case. She increased the tempo to one gong stroke per heartbeat. He found that it curiously matched his own pulse so closely it was as if his heart had acquired a sound effect. This in turn reminded him of his own percussion role. He reached beside him for the rattle and began to shake it. He had a surprisingly good sense of rhythm for a septuagenarian. By the time he’d incorporated the finger bells he thought that at another time and place they might even have been able to make a few kip playing backup band at temple fairs.

He had to keep track of the timing. The hood had disoriented him but he had to remember to begin his unconscious twitching at about the right time. There was something haunting about the rhythm and he was afraid he’d already forgotten to do something important. What was that? Never mind. As he didn’t possess the gift of tongues and he was supposed to yell every now and then, he decided that French would be sufficiently incomprehensible to the audience. Although he found himself forgetting the words and slurring through much of it, he recited the chorus of “La Marseillaise”:

Grab your weapons, citizens!

Form your battalions!

Let us march! Let us march!

May… da dee dee da

The gong was beating faster now along with his racing heart and his arm was aching from all the rattling. His head was nodding and his foot was tapping to the beat. He completely forgot whether he was to mount the bench at this time or simply stand and fall back into his assistant’s waiting arms. A lot of conflicting thoughts were going through his mind, memories of events that had no place there. His amulet seemed to sizzle against his skin. Feed the horse? Now? He reached into his pouch, grabbed a handful of puffed maize, and threw it into the air, shouting, “Ride ‘em, cowboy,” one of his few English phrases, harvested from a favorite John Wayne movie. For some reason his arm continued to flutter in the air there and he couldn’t get it to come down.

He had pins and needles in his legs so when he looked down through the gap beneath his hood he was surprised to see his feet kicking out into thin air. To recall his errant limbs he swung his body a little carelessly over the bench to sit astride his winged steed. He was sure he’d skewered himself on a splinter or two but his bottom was numb as a loaf of bread. During the previous night’s rehearsal all the shaking and leaping had tuckered him out after no more than five minutes but he was riding feverishly now and felt nothing at all. “La Marseillaise” had become complete gibberish even to him and the gong beats blended together and faded away like ink spots in a pond.

And he was gone-a dream-a hallucination-the effects of a wood splinter puncturing an important nerve? He wasn’t sure which. But something had sent him. And the place he’d arrived at was more real than the one he’d just left. He felt-not sensed but actually felt-the winged horse between his thighs. He felt and smelled and tasted the night air rushing against his face. The moisture in the clouds they passed through was icy cold on his cheeks. His senses in the real world had been draining of late. There were no distinct colors or tastes in the actual Laos. But they were all here. They assaulted and bombarded him. This was his new reality.

The muscles of his steed flexed and relaxed as the huge white wings found currents of air on which to glide down toward the building tops. Siri’s stomach heaved as the creature soared and dove between the skyscrapers. He clung to the cusp of a wing and its force vibrated through him. They flew down past office windows where men in shirts and ties drank coffee and watched them pass with looks of astonishment on their Western faces. Then an apartment building where a woman in curlers hanging washing from her window was so shocked she dropped her stockings and they floated down to the street like wisps of smoke from the tenth story.

Lower and darker: the smells of smog and fried meat and garbage and hairspray. And a bump. The winged steed skidded to a stop on the icy sidewalk and white steam smudged the air around her nostrils. Her front hoof scraped at the ground and she shook her mane. Siri stayed put.

“This is the Otherworld?” he asked. For some reason he expected a flying horse would have the ability to speak. “This is where all the shamans come to negotiate for lost souls? Fm disappointed, I don’t mind telling you.”

She didn’t answer with words and he didn’t speak whinny so he gave up and climbed down. He wasn’t appropriately dressed at all. He knew he’d catch his death of cold. He felt the burn of the ice on the soles of his bare feet. Yet instinctively he knew the thrill of it-the warming excitement of being on the other side-would keep him alive. His thudding heartbeat alone could power a tank.

They’d arrived on a deserted main street at the mouth of a dark alleyway. He looked at the horse, who in turn looked toward the side street.

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

Siri walked into the yawning darkness and immediately felt a morbid sense of familiarity. He’d been here recently. He’d walked along these uneven paving stones and squinted through the gray lamplight. It was his dream. This was the selfsame place he’d walked on the day he was given the sleeping poison. He knew what to expect. He knew that up ahead he’d meet two thugs and be attacked. He stopped. Common sense told him that he should learn from his mistakes. The dream had been a warning. He had no weapon still. He couldn’t outrun them.

“No, Siri. Go back to the horse and find a different path. Once bitten…”

He turned on his heel and headed back the way he’d come. But the stones seemed more uneven than they had just been. The street lamps stretched further into the distance than was possible. He passed a doorway he hadn’t noticed and heard familiar voices from the shadows.

“Well, whaddya know? The gook’s back.”

“So he is. What’s new, Red? Been busy torturing the good guys, have ya?”

This was wholly different from the dream. It had an extra dimension. In dreams he was in some kind of control, aware that he was in a dream. Even when he was frightened by them, something at the back of his mind told him it would all be over at cockcrow. But this felt so real. His feet and fingers were aching from the cold. He had a terrible urge to go to the bathroom and a tingle of fear rode the back of his neck. Up ahead, in the direction he thought he’d come from, he saw the lights of the Silver Pheasant. Somehow, he had to do a better job of getting past these goons.

“Look,” he said. “If you leave me alone I won’t call on my auxiliary spirits.”

“Ooooh,” mocked the first thug, stepping out of the doorway. The lamplight turned his skull the color of nicotine-stained teeth. He seemed to have grown in stature since they’d last met. Siri considered asking whether he’d been working out but decided it was a bad time for humor.

“You hear that, Eric?” the thug said. “Grandpa’s gonna call the auxes.”

Eric remained in the shadows.

“Think you might be too late, Red Man,” the second thug said.

Siri knew the skeleton was right. That was what he’d forgotten. He could see it underlined on his cheat sheet. “Must invoke guiding spirits before going into trance.” He was a hopeless shaman. But, hell, he hadn’t planned all this. It was supposed to be a hoax. It was worth a try anyway.

“I’m warning you,” he said.

“I’m trembling,” said the first thug.

“Very well.” Like some ancient magician, Siri raised his arms to the tops of the buildings that towered over him. “I invoke the spirit of the otter.”

“Tsk tsk,” came a sound from the shadows. “Did he invoke the otter, Danny?”

“Sure did, Eric.”

“Bad choice, Reddo. You should have gone for the eagle.”

“Much better idea, gook. Otters are for water problems and what you’ve got-”

Eric stepped out of the doorway, almost twice his previous size. “-is mugger problems.”

“Go through his pockets while he’s still standing, Danny boy.”

The first goon had a solid presence about him, like a front-end loader with attitude. Siri had no pockets but he allowed the pouch to be plucked from his waist without any retaliation.

“Then I invoke the spirit of the great eagle,” Siri said, halfheartedly. Nothing happened.

“Give it up, Red Man.”

“Don’t you listen, gook?” Eric said, leaning against the wall with a Lucky Strike dangling unlit from his lower jaw. He was even more stained and chipped than his colleague. “You’ve blown it. You gotta invoke before you get on the horse, man.” He leaned down into Siri’s face and breathed rotten teeth at him. “You’re aux-less.”

The first thug was digging down through the pouch, throwing out puffed maize.

“He got any money?” Eric asked.

“Nah, nothing.”

“Shit, let’s kill him.”

“No wait.” The thug known as Danny had found something deep in the pouch. “Oh, man, look!”

His hand emerged from the bag with two bone fingers holding onto a button. Siri had forgotten all about it, didn’t even recall putting it in the pouch. It was the button he’d dredged up from the bottom of the rock pool. Danny handed it to Eric, who looked at Siri with as much emotion as a skull could ever hope to muster.

“So he knows.” Eric nodded.

“Looks like it.”

“Have to let him go.”

“I guess.

“You owe us for this, gook.”

“Big-time.”

Eric flipped the button into the air like a coin. Siri glanced up for a second and caught it on its way back down. But when he turned his head toward the muggers, they were no longer there. He looked around and he was all alone in that badly lit place.

“Most peculiar,” he thought.

He looked at the button. There was nothing special about it: green plastic, normal size for a shirt. He held it to his nose to see whether his enhanced sense of smell might tell him something. It had been submerged in water so he didn’t hold out much hope, but there was a very faint scent of… desperation.

“Remember where you are, Siri. Remember, none of this is credible.”

He put the button back in his pouch and staggered forward over the uneven stones to the end-or the beginning-of the alley. On the far side of a busy boulevard the gaudy lights of the Silver Pheasant beckoned. He negotiated the traffic with no problem as it was without substance, blurs of metallic paint flying past in either direction. But on the far sidewalk he encountered a long queue of shamans dressed much like he was, all waiting to get into the club. A huge black bouncer stood at the door with a list in his hand and a pistol sticking out of his belt. As Siri didn’t consider himself to have any special rights over the others, he nodded and smiled at the waiting men and women and joined the back of the line.

Four hours later he was still there and the queue hadn’t advanced more than a step or two. Others had fallen in behind him but none of his line mates seemed particularly talkative. He kept himself entertained by singing the Hmong refrain to the dead he’d learned at the funeral.

Aha, your ghost, my sister, richly dressed

Appears on the other side,

Pretty like you-your spitting image

Is it you or not?

Look, that woman, that stranger,

She sings you a spirit song,

Your ghost takes you by the hand and-

His song was interrupted by a big booming voice from up ahead.

“Yeh Ming, is that you, man?”

Siri looked up to see the bouncer on the sidewalk looking over the heads of the other shamans. He held his knuckles against his waist and wore a big gappy grand-piano smile across his mouth.

“I don’t believe it,” he said. “It is too.”

He waded into the crowd like a whale through sardines and hugged Siri to him so tightly that Siri would carry the indentation of a pistol on his stomach for days.

“You son of a gun,” the bouncer continued. He took a step back and looked at Siri’s confused face. “Don’t you recognize me, Yeh Ming? It’s me, man. See Yee.”

Siri racked his brains. The only See Yee he could recall was the traditional god of shamans. He’d always imagined him to be more… well, this wasn’t the way he’d imagined him to look.

“Good health,” Siri said.

“Good health? Good health is all I get after all them years? After all we been through, Yeh Ming?”

“You’re right, sorry.”

“You must be-what you doing back here in the queue anyhow? You’re Yeh Ming. Get your bony little fanny up front.”

There were groans and complaints from the assembled shamans.

“Come on! I was here first.”

“I’ve been here a month.”

“I’m telling my local representative. This isn’t the way we…”

“Hey, cool it, guys,” See Yee said, leading Siri to the main door. “This here is Yeh Ming. You guys gotta do a helluva lot of standing before you’re even nearly worthy of kissing this shaman’s behind. So shut your whining.”

With a wink, he ushered Siri through the doors and told him they’d catch up later. It took Siri a moment to get used to the glare inside. He’d been expecting some type of club-disco music and the like, crowds of dancing shamans and the stale smell of beer. What he saw in fact was a huge open-air swimming pool, even bigger than Olympic size. In the water, floating on an inflatable mattress, was a little man with a potbelly and a martini glass. His sunglasses were so large it was impossible to tell his ethnicity. Beneath the surface all around him were large green lizardlike creatures. They performed in pairs like synchronized swimmers.

At the side of the pool, under an enormous purple beach umbrella, was a wooden desk piled high with papers and folders and alphabetically indexed ledgers. Siri’s wave to the man in the pool went unanswered so he approached the desk. Even a few feet away it was impossible to tell whether there was anyone in residence. Not till he heard the voice.

“Name?”

Siri tried to look around the stacks but saw no one.

“Dr. Siri Paiboun,” he said.

There was a brief flutter of papers.

“Don’t have anyone here with such a name. Next!” said the voice.

Siri walked around to the side of the desk and peered through the folders. He could only see a crop of ginger hair above the piles.

“I’m here to negotiate for the soul of a friend’s daughter,” Siri said.

“Oh, really? And I thought you might be here to fix the filter system,” the voice said impatiently. “Next!”

“Well, I could have a look at it for you,” Siri said. “But I’m better with water pumps.”

He heard a nasal huff.

“It was sarcasm, brother. All we do here is negotiate for souls. But we don’t have any daughters on our lists called Dr. Siri Paiboun. Now, if you don’t mind…”

“Oh, I see. Her name isn’t Dr. Siri Paiboun.”

“So why did you say it was?”

Siri pushed over a stack of files with his finger. It collapsed a second and a third stack and exposed a stunned, red-faced man who looked at him through bloodshot eyes.

“Wh…?”

Siri said, “You find some of the most bad-mannered people in jobs dealing with the public. Why do you suppose that is?”

“What?”

“It takes skills to deal with people day in and day out. Customers have feelings, you know? It isn’t that difficult to show a little courtesy and civility. It takes no more effort to make your clients happy than it does to depress the socks off them. If you can’t do that, I don’t really know why you’re here. There are plenty of noncontact careers available for bookkeepers.”

There was a long silence during which the two stared at each other. The ginger-haired man swallowed and his voice broke a little as he said, “I’m Nyuwa Tuatay, the deputy overlord of the Otherworld.”

“Then, as I say, perhaps you should be looking for a position that better suits your personality. And who’s he?” Siri asked, pointing to the figure on the air mattress.

“You don’t know?”

“Would I ask if I did?”

“That is Nyuwa Neyu, the great overlord.”

“I’d say you drew the short straw, comrade.”

The man in the pool smiled and beckoned Siri to join him.

“Sorry, I can’t swim. Perhaps next time.”

Another silence.

“What can I do for you?” the bookkeeper asked.

“Much better. I’m here to negotiate for the soul of a friend’s daughter.”

“And her name is?” He added, “If you’d be so kind.”

Siri smiled. “Chamee Mua.”

“Age?”

“Fourteen.”

There was more flipping of pages. Siri looked over at the pool. A blonde nymph in a polka dot bikini was swimming out with a fresh martini. Being the overlord of the Otherworld didn’t seem to be the most taxing of jobs. He considered taking an application form himself.

“I’m sorry,” Nyuwa Tuatay told Siri.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t have a Chamee Mua on my list… and I’ve checked twice.”

“And what does that mean?”

“It probably means all her souls are still with her.” Siri stepped out of the sun and into the shade of the umbrella to consider matters.

“Hmm,” he said.

“Anything else I can do?” the deputy asked respectfully. “What if she were possessed by a demon?” Siri asked. “Oh, then that’s a different department altogether.” “And that is?”

“Demons reside in the Land of the Dead.”

“And how do I get there?”

“You die.”

“Really? I can’t just go and visit?”

“Can a tree in the forest temporarily fall down?”

“Is that a ‘no’?”

“It is.”

Siri walked a slow circuit of the desk and came back to the clearing he’d forged through the paperwork.

“One more question,” he said.

“Please.”

“If a person were possessed by a devil, isn’t it likely his or her soul would be troubled and you’d have some record?”

“One would think so. But I’m not qualified to do philosophy here,” the deputy told him matter-of-factly. “That’s two blocks east on Seventy-fifth. Here’s their card.”

Siri knew he had a room full of people waiting for him back on earth but he spent some time chewing the fat with See Yee on the front step, talking about old times he wasn’t personally a part of, before heading back toward the alley. He didn’t bother with the Philosophy Department. He already had his answer. The winged steed was parked on the main street at the far end of the walkway where he’d left it. A parking attendant was looking for somewhere to attach a citation. Siri ignored him, climbed majestically onto the horse’s back, and flew away.

There was a splinter in Siri’s backside. He felt it as he

fell backward into Bao’s waiting arms. She was a deceptively strong girl.

“OK, Yeh Ming. That should do,” she whispered so only he could hear. She pulled back the mask and the afternoon sun through the window blinded him. He was surprised it was still day. He continued to sit astride the bench. The rattle was no longer in his hand. The audience remained remarkably enthralled considering the number of hours he’d been away. Elder Long looked at Siri with admiration: the great Yeh Ming presiding over an exorcism right here in his own village. Who would have believed it? He nodded his head and raised his eyebrows as if expecting Siri to give him a summary of the trip.

Siri was far from certain what had just happened.

“I need a while to prepare my report,” Siri said.

Nobody in the room moved.

“Alone,” he added. Long and the women got to their feet and paraded out the door. When they were gone and only he and Bao remained in the shaman’s hut he whispered excitedly, “I did it.”

“It was quite convincing,” she said, putting out the candle. “You were better in the rehearsal but I expect you were nervous.”

“No, I mean I did it. I went to the Otherworld.”

She turned to him. “Yeh Ming, there are just the two of us here.”

“I know. So I have no reason to lie.”

She walked to him and knelt by the bench. “You’re serious, Yeh Ming.”

“I am. I can hardly believe it myself. If I was anybody else I’d call me a liar too. Isn’t it marvelous?”

“Tell me about it. Tell me everything.”

“Well, I was rather expecting caves and an underground lake and a mountain, all the things I’d read in the legends.”

“My father said the location can depend on influence from the victim and the imagination of the shaman.”

“Is that so? Then I have no idea who’s been playing with my head.”

“Where were you?”

“Somewhere in North America, I believe. It was a city. Nowhere I’ve ever been in real life. There were skyscrapers and the streets had a layer of ice.”

Siri told her the whole story. There were parts that neither of them understood-the street thugs foremost among them-but everything else was as logical as necromancy can be.

“And all that in three hundred heartbeats. Wonderful.” Bao smiled.

“Three hundred? Why that’s not much more than five minutes. I was only in the trance for five minutes?”

“At the most. You’ve done very well, Yeh Ming. I’m happy for you. But I’m sad for Elder Long.”

“Why?”

“You learned nothing about Chamee.”

“Oh, but I did.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will. But first I have to go to her house again.”

“Are you sure? You still have the bruises from last time.”

“Ah, but last time I didn’t know what I was dealing with.” He stood and gently patted his rear end.

“And now you do?”

“I hope so.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No, Bao. Not this time. This is something I have to do by myself. It’ll be all right. I promise.”

“I trust you.”

Siri retrieved the ceremonial dagger from the earth and used the rice whisky to clean the earth from it.

“I should think this is pretty well sanctified now, wouldn’t you?”

He walked gingerly to the door but stopped as he reached the doorway. An unpleasant memory had suddenly returned to him.

“Did you happen to see…?”

“Your weak-minded ‘assistant’? He fainted. Dia took him back to his bed.”

“Do you think he’ll remember?”

“I’m afraid he might.”

“Damn.”