It was a rainy night when she appeared at my office door--a slender Chinese woman with her dark hair pulled back into a pony tail. She was wearing a long, black raincoat and carrying an e-reader. I recognized her immediately.
"Mae Ling," I said, fear forming in the pit of my stomach. "What brings you here?"
"Relax, Miller," she replied in English with an accent that was vaguely British but mostly the result of having been in many places and among speakers of many English dialects. "I've been reading the stories you've written about me. You make me look good."
"Thank you," I said.
"I'm here to give you a new story. You'll write it, I'll read it, and give you immediate feedback."
She then told me of a recent contract.
I saved the piece I had been working on, opened a fresh document, and began typing...
FALSE MERCIES -- A GHOST OF HONG KONG TALE
The incense smoke rose like prayers made visible, curling and twisting in the amber light that filtered through the temple's latticed windows. Outside, the sea whispered its eternal secrets to the rocks of Shek O Village, and the wind carried the salt-taste of distant storms.
The woman who knelt before the altar wore grief like a second skin. Her hands trembled as they clutched the red envelope containing two hundred Hong Kong dollars. Her hair hung in dark curtains around her face, and when she looked up at the rotund priest who sat cross-legged before the statue of Tin Hau, her eyes were wells of desperate hope.
"Please," she whispered, and the word seemed to echo in the temple's hollow spaces, bouncing off the golden dragons that coiled around the pillars, sliding past the paper lanterns that swayed like captured moons. "Please, Tin Hau, tell me what has become of my husband. The sea took him three weeks ago, and I have heard nothing. Nothing but the sound of waves in my dreams."
The priest—his name was Wu, though he preferred to be called Master Wu—regarded her with the practiced sympathy of a man who had seen a thousand desperate souls kneel where she now knelt. His robes were silk, expensive silk, and his fingers were heavy with jade rings that caught the light like captured fireflies. He was a man who understood that faith and fear were currencies more valuable than gold, and he had grown wealthy in their exchange.
"The goddess hears all prayers," he intoned, his voice deep and resonant as a temple bell. "But the veil between this world and the next is thick, and sometimes... sometimes it requires great effort to pierce it."
He reached for the incense sticks that stood in their brass holder like a forest of fragrant trees. With deliberate slowness, he lit three of them, and the smoke began its serpentine dance toward the ceiling, where it would dissipate into nothing, into everything, into the spaces between breath and belief.
Master Wu closed his eyes. His breathing slowed, deepened, became the rhythm of waves upon shore. The woman watched him with the intensity of the drowning watching a distant boat, her hands clasped so tightly that her knuckles had gone white as bone.
Minutes passed. The incense burned. The smoke rose. The sea outside continued its ancient conversation with the land.
Then Master Wu's eyes opened, and in them was a light that might have been divine inspiration or might have been something far more calculated.
"I see," he breathed, and his voice had taken on a tremulous quality, as if he stood at the edge of some great precipice. "The goddess Tin Hau... she shows me an island. Small, rocky, surrounded by waters that foam white against black stone. And there... there is a man."
The woman leaned forward, her breath catching in her throat like a bird in a cage.
"He stands at the water's edge," Master Wu continued, his eyes now focused on some middle distance that existed only in his mind—or in his performance. "He is thin, weathered by sun and salt. And he is shouting. Shouting a name. Your name, I think. Yes, your name, carried away by the wind, lost in the cry of gulls."
A sound escaped the woman's lips, something between a sob and a gasp, and Master Wu allowed himself the smallest of smiles, hidden in the shadows of his jowls.
"But wait," he said, and his expression darkened like clouds crossing the sun. "The vision... it fragments. It breaks apart like a reflection in disturbed water. The goddess... she struggles to show me more. Something interferes. Something dark and malevolent."
"What?" the woman whispered. "What interferes?"
Master Wu's hands moved in complex patterns through the smoke, as if he were trying to grasp something that continually slipped through his fingers. "Her brothers," he said, and now his voice carried a note of genuine-seeming distress. "The demonic brothers of Tin Hau. They dwell in the underworld, in the spaces beneath the sea where drowned men's souls wander lost and cold. They feed on suffering, on separation, on the tears of widows and the cries of orphans. And they are here now, blocking the goddess's sight, preventing her from revealing the full truth of your husband's fate."
The woman's face had gone pale as paper, pale as the moon reflected in still water.
"But there is hope," Master Wu said quickly, leaning forward with an urgency that seemed almost genuine. "A show of devotion—a true show of devotion—can give the goddess the power she needs to drive her brothers back to the underworld where they belong. The demons are strong, but faith is stronger. Devotion is stronger. And with the proper... offerings... the goddess can prevail."
The woman's hands moved to the red envelope she had brought, the envelope containing her last two hundred dollars. She held it out with shaking fingers, and Master Wu took it with the reverence of a man accepting a sacred relic.
He opened it, counted the bills with practiced speed, and nodded slowly. "Yes," he said. "Yes, I believe this will be sufficient. The goddess is merciful. She understands the poverty of the faithful. Let me pray again, let me—"
He closed his eyes once more, his hands pressed together before his face. His lips moved in silent supplication, or what appeared to be supplication. The incense smoke continued its endless rise, and the temple seemed to hold its breath.
Then Master Wu jerked as if struck by an invisible hand. His eyes flew open, wide with what might have been fear or might have been theatrical surprise. He gasped, clutched at his chest, and when he spoke again, his voice was hoarse.
"The demons," he wheezed. "They are stronger than I anticipated. Much stronger. They feed off your distress, your desperation. They grow fat on your tears. The goddess... she needs more. More devotion. More faith. More—"
He didn't say the word "money," but it hung in the air between them like the incense smoke, visible and invisible at once.
The woman stood slowly, her movements careful, controlled. "I'll go to the bank," she said, her voice steady now, all the trembling gone from it like morning mist burned away by sun. "I can get more. I'll be back as soon as I can."
Master Wu nodded, relief washing over his features like water over stone. "Yes," he said. "Yes, hurry. The goddess's power wanes with each passing moment. The demons grow stronger. Your husband's soul hangs in the balance, suspended between this world and the next, and only your devotion can—"
The woman had turned to leave, her footsteps echoing on the temple's stone floor. But then she stopped. Turned back. And when she looked at Master Wu now, her eyes were different. They were no longer wells of desperate hope. They were something else entirely. Something cold and clear and utterly without mercy.
"You had a nice scam going here," she said, and her voice was conversational, almost friendly. "Really, quite elegant in its simplicity. Prey on the desperate, the grieving, the ones who have nowhere else to turn. Tell them just enough to give them hope, then squeeze them for everything they have. I've seen it before, in a dozen cities, in a hundred temples. It's an old game, Master Wu. Old as faith itself."
Master Wu's face had gone from relieved to confused to outraged in the space of three heartbeats. "How dare you," he sputtered, rising to his feet with surprising speed for a man of his bulk. "How dare you come into this sacred place and—"
"If only you hadn't gotten greedy with the wrong mark," the woman continued, as if he hadn't spoken at all. Her hand moved to her purse, and there was something in the casual way she did it that made Master Wu's words die in his throat like flowers touched by frost.
"What... what do you mean?" he asked, and now the fear in his voice was real, no longer performance, no longer theater.
"Leilie Hong," the woman said, and the name fell into the temple's silence like a stone into still water, sending ripples of implication in all directions. "Three weeks ago, she came to you. An old woman, desperate to know the fate of her son, who had gone missing. You told her the same story, didn't you? The same vision, the same demonic interference, the same need for greater and greater devotion. You took everything she had. Every last dollar. And when she had nothing left to give, you told her that her son was lost, that the demons had won, that her lack of faith had doomed him."
Master Wu's face had gone the color of old wax. His jade rings suddenly seemed too heavy, weighing down his hands like shackles.
"She went home that night," the woman continued, her voice still conversational, still almost friendly, which somehow made it more terrible than if she had been shouting. "She went home and she hanged herself from a beam in her kitchen. Because you had taken her money and her hope and left her with nothing but despair."
"I... I didn't know," Master Wu whispered. "I couldn't have known that she would—"
"Her son found her," the woman said. "Charlie Hong. Perhaps you've heard of him?"
The name hit Master Wu like a physical blow. Charlie Hong. Everyone in Hong Kong's underworld knew that name. Charlie Hong, who ran the illegal fight clubs in Kowloon, who had connections that reached from the Triads to the police to the very highest levels of the city's shadow government. Charlie Hong, who was known for his loyalty to his family, his ruthlessness toward his enemies, and his absolute unwillingness to forgive those who wronged the people he loved.
"Oh god," Master Wu breathed, and he stumbled backward, his bulk suddenly seeming less imposing, more vulnerable, like a balloon slowly deflating. "Oh god, I didn't... I never meant..."
The woman's hand emerged from her purse, and in it was a pistol. Small, black, with a suppressor attached to the barrel that made it look like some kind of mechanical insect, all angles and purpose. She held it with the casual competence of someone who had held such things many times before, who knew their weight and their function and their terrible finality.
"Please," Master Wu said, and now he was the one who sounded desperate, the one whose voice trembled with fear. "Please, I'll give the money back. I'll leave Hong Kong. I'll—"
"Charlie Hong called upon a ghost of vengeance," the woman said, and her voice was soft now, soft as the incense smoke, soft as the whisper of the sea outside. "He called upon someone who could walk into temples and speak the language of grief, who could play the role of the desperate widow, who could get close enough to deliver justice to those who prey upon the suffering of others."
She raised the pistol, and the movement was smooth, practiced, inevitable as the rising of the sun.
"And vengeance," she said, "will be delivered."
The shot was barely louder than a cough, muffled by the suppressor and swallowed by the temple's thick walls. Master Wu fell backward, his silk robes billowing around him like the wings of some great, dying bird. He hit the floor with a sound like a sack of rice dropping, and the jade rings on his fingers clattered against the stone.
The woman stood over him for a moment, watching as the light faded from his eyes, as the blood spread in a dark pool beneath his body, mixing with the ash from the incense that had fallen when he fell. Then she tucked the pistol back into her purse, straightened her hair, and walked toward the temple's entrance with the same careful, controlled movements she had used when she arrived.
But she paused at the altar, her hand reaching for the bundle of incense sticks that Master Wu would never light again. She took three—the proper number—and held them to the flame of a red candle, her hands steady as stone despite the body cooling behind her. The tips caught and glowed, and she watched the smoke begin its ascent, thin threads of gray rising toward the temple's dark rafters.
She bowed once, deeply, holding the incense before her face. The smoke curled between her fingers, and she breathed in its sandalwood sweetness mixed with the copper-salt smell of fresh blood.
"Forgive me, Tin Hau," she whispered, and her voice was different now—not the desperate widow's plea, not the cold pronouncement of vengeance, but something more honest. "I have stained your temple with blood. But you are the protector of the suffering, and he made his fortune from their pain."
She placed the incense in the brass holder before the goddess's statue, the three sticks standing straight and true. The painted eyes gazed down at her, and for a moment—just a moment—she thought she saw something in that ancient, unchanging face. Not forgiveness, perhaps. But understanding. The goddess had sailed through storms and witnessed drownings, had seen the sea take the innocent and spare the guilty, had learned that justice and mercy were not always the same thing. The woman bowed once more, then turned and walked toward the entrance, leaving the incense to burn, leaving her prayer to rise, leaving the goddess to judge whether vengeance could ever be holy.
The woman walked down the temple steps and disappeared into the narrow streets of Shek O Village, just another figure in the afternoon crowd, anonymous and unremarkable. Behind her, in the Temple of Tin Hau, Master Wu's blood spread dark across the stone floor while incense smoke rose in serpentine spirals toward the rafters.
--
After I finished the story, I stood up and gestured at the chair for Mae Ling to have a seat. She did so with a nod and began to read. I watched her nervously--I wasn't used to advanced readers or critics who could kill you in who-knows-how-many different ways if they didn't like what they read.
I was bathed in a cold sweat by the time Mae Ling reached the end of "False Mercies". She turned to look up at me, her expression unreadable.
"It's just the first draft," I said, the terror building in my chest. "I'll fix whatever you--"
"Don't change a thing," Mae Ling said, rising to her feet, smiling. "I love it. And I really loved the whole prayer bit at the end. You're going to put it in the next Ghost of Hong Kong collection, right?"
"If I do one, of course I will."
"Excellent." With that, she turned and walked toward the door and out of my office. I heard her chuckling softly before saying, "Forgive me Tin Hau... priceless!"
Seconds later, I heard the front door open and close. The Ghost had melted back into the shadows where her next assignment waited.
