The Shotgun Arcana (27 page)

“You must do everything through being, nothing through acting,” Ch’eng Huang said. “The first and last step of being comes from the breath. Breathe.”

Jim sat in the venerable Chinese tong boss and mystic’s inner sanctum, cross-legged on the carpeted floor. He was struggling to place his hands in the first mudra position while regulating his breathing. The shadowy room’s walls were covered in astrology charts, horoscopes and ancient tapestries. The shelves of the room held all manner and shape of bottles holding numerous questionable liquids, crumbling scrolls, worm-eaten books, and trinkets of brass, glass and jade. A heavy brazier of hot coals and dozens of candles about the room provided the only light. The pouch Jim normally wore about his neck by a leather cord lay in front of him.

“You taught me this the first day,” Jim said. “I’ve been practicing, just like you told me. I breathe real good now.”

“No,” Huang said. “You practice breathing well. You must make it part of you, part of being, Jim, if you want to open your energy, want to access it.”

Jim had been coming to Huang, with his long white beard that fell to his knees, his dark, almost infinite eyes and his robes of green silk, for almost eight months now, to try to understand the artifact that was his birthright—his father’s jade eye.

The eye’s original owner, Huang said, was Pangu, the god that created the universe. One of Pangu’s eyes became the sun and the other, the left eye, Jim’s eye, the moon. Apparently the Eye of the Moon had been stolen by another Chinese god and returned to men, and from there had made its way to Billy Negrey.

Huang sat on cushions behind a low table of teak in the center of the opulent room on the second floor of Huang’s sprawling saloon, brothel and opium den, the Celestial Palace.

The Palace was the heart of Huang’s empire in Golgotha, as the Paradise Falls was Malachi Bick’s stronghold. Huang controlled the four or five blocks of narrow maze-like streets that the white locals called Johnny Town, which housed the growing population of Chinese who called Golgotha home.

Jim closed his eyes and tried to relax. He exhaled deeply, feeling it all the way to his abdomen, and then slowly, deeply, filled his lungs again, breathing all the way to his lower stomach. He kept doing this, emptying his mind as Huang had taught him to do. His breathing deepened and thoughts diminished. He was breathing and feeling very good.

He was uncertain how long he was like this before he heard Huang’s voice.

“Good,” Huang said. “Now bring forth the eye.”

He imagined the eye was between and above his eyes. He felt his body fill with light with each deep, cleansing breath. Jim slowly directed the light to the pouch he could see in his mind and slowly the eye rolled out of its own volition. The light lifted it off the floor and the eye arose, held aloft seemingly by nothing. It hovered before the boy’s head.

“Very good,” Huang said quietly. “You are doing very well, Jim. Now, today,” Huang continued, “we will work toward using the eye to open doorways. It is a gateway to many different worlds and powers, if you can unlock the proper doors.”

“Is that why you’re always talking about keys?” Jim said.

“Chi,” Huang corrected, “and in a manner of speaking, Chi can be used to open many doors, within and without.”

“The eye ain’t never done nothing, ’cept at night in the moonlight,” Jim said. As he spoke, the eye faltered in the air before him. He gasped and tried to right it. It dropped a few inches, then remained hovering.

“The eye is tied to the moon, true,” Huang said. “But it is also tied to the sun, its brother eye. The moon reflects the sun. It will work in the day, but it requires more effort on your part to make it do so, Jim. Now stop diverting your attention, stop jabbering. Breathe, be.”

When Jim had first arrived in Golgotha, he’d worried that Ch’eng Huang had wanted to steal the eye. The eye; his father’s pistol from the war; and Jim’s horse, Promise, were all he had left of his family and his life before he began his run. Talking with the old man, at the urging of the mysterious Malachi Bick, had proven to be the right thing to do and Jim had been able to use the eye to save Golgotha and possibly even the world. That part seemed very unreal even now, a year later. Folks in Golgotha tended to make their way through a disaster and then try as hard as they could to forget all about it, cover it up, hide it. Jim didn’t agree with doing that, but he could understand it.

Huang said the eye had nearly infinite power but that it could only be unlocked by a Wu, a trained sorcerer, whatever that meant exactly, so Jim had asked Huang for instruction. He had come a long way, mostly learning how to calm himself and to focus his mind. He had begun the long and treacherous path of joining his mind to the mudras, the finger meditations that Huang said were a critical component of unlocking the jade eye’s secrets. Now, almost a year in, Jim saw he had so much further to go, but he was determined to master the eye, and to make his pa proud.

“I want you to imagine the eye in the center of your forehead, as we discussed,” Huang said. “I want you to feel the coolness of the glass against your skin, feel it connected to you.”

“Okay,” Jim said after a few moments.

“Now, imagine standing on a plain. Feel the wind move around you, through you. Feel the wind caress your face, your hair. Hold that image, that feeling, don’t let it fall away.”

Jim’s eyes were closed. He felt the dry desert wind kiss him. He was riding Promise across the scrubland at the edge of the desolate 40-Mile. It was warm, but not hot. He could feel the grit on his pursed lips and smell the leather of the reins. He was there; the rhythm of Promise’s gallop was hypnotic.

“Good,” a distant voice said. “Now I want you to open the eye. Imagine opening your other eyes wide, but you are only opening the jade eye. Wide … wider. Feel the wind pass through you, through the eye. Wide open now.…”

Jim saw through the jade eye. The world was painted in lines of force, cause, effect and color, brilliant, prismatic strands of thread tied to everything. Swirling winds of gold, crimson, azure and emerald roared, vibrating the humming, resonant cords. The eye saw the music of the world.

Jim felt arms about his waist. Soft, slender, strong arms warmer than the desert wind that was against his face. He felt a head resting on his shoulder. He turned and saw long brown hair fluttering, shining, in the sun. Constance Stapleton, her wide, brown eyes looking at him as she raised her head from his shoulder. She looked beautiful, but a little sad. She was saying something but he couldn’t hear. Constance leaned closer to his ear.

“Wider…,” Huang’s faraway voice said. “Open.”

Jim’s eyes opened. He was back in Huang’s chamber. Huang had placed a large cylinder of a green candle on the low table between them. Its wick was trailing black smoke. A few of the papers behind the old man fluttered as did the wisps of his beard. The jade eye began to drop and Jim held out his hand. It fell into his palm with a soft thud. Jim closed his hand around the eye and looked at Huang.

“Adequate,” Huang said, his face quickly recovering from some surprise. “A good start.”

One of Huang’s men, a member of the notorious Green Ribbon Tong, brought tea and cakes. Tattoos festooned his arms. Guns and axes hung from his belt as he entered and exited like a servile ghost. Huang prepared the tea for himself and his young guest.

“So last night, at the church, I got an idea to use the eye to try to find the murderer of these women,” Jim said as he accepted a cup from Huang. “And it worked! I made all the lights in the church flare up and found him. He got away, but the eye did what I wanted it to do … sort of.”

“The eye’s power comes from the moon,” Huang said. “Moonlight is a redirection of the sun’s true light. The eye’s powers are tied to misdirection, distortion, mystery and reflection. It is good you are growing more confident in its use, Jim.”

“Well, I wanted to ask you,” Jim said. “The first thing I learned the eye could do was let me speak to haints—y’know, the dead. Last year I was able to talk to Mr. Stapleton and he helped identify his killer for us.”

“Yes?” Huang said.

“I tried the same trick with the two dead girls,” Jim said, “last night, when her body and Molly’s were both over at Clay Turlough’s place, but I got nothing. I was wondering if I was doing something wrong?”

“First of all, what the eye does is no trick,” Huang said, somewhat indignant. “It is a power of the highest order, tied to the creation of the universe. Second, these women, they were of a low station, yes? Few ties to their homes and families? Such lonely and isolated people, ones at the fringes of society, they have few anchors to hold their spirit here and few to miss them, to mourn them. Also they were torn from this world in a most savage and horrible way, correct?”

“Yes,” Jim said coldly, his jaw set. Ch’eng Huang nodded.

“You have a great capacity for compassion, boy,” Huang said. “Have a care. Emotion is the fuel that drives a sorcerer, gives him power when all other resources have failed him. Too much fuel ignited devours everything.”

“What happens to people like that, fringe people, when they die?” Jim asked.

“The same thing that happens to everyone else,” Huang replied, “exactly what they have trained their souls to expect. Now tell me of your vision from today.”

“It was like I was there, in the desert,” Jim said. “At first it was me imagining what you were talking about—the wind.”

“Yes,” Huang said, nodding. “I wanted to see if you could open the door to the House of the Tiger, the land of the wind. I have undertaken your horoscope and you are born under the tiger. Though your element is wood, not wind, you were successful. You did very well, Jim. However, there was something else that happened?”

“There was a girl with me,” Jim said. “She wasn’t, then she was.”

“I see,” Huang said, smiling thinly. “And how old are you now, Master Negrey?” he asked, already knowing the answer to the minute and the second.

“Sixteen,” Jim said, sipping his tea. “Last month.”

“Ah,” Huang said. “Well, that explains the girl, doesn’t it?”

Jim reddened. “No, no. I knew her. It was Constance, Widow Stapleton’s daughter. It felt like a memory more than anything.”

Huang set down his tea and stroked his beard. “The eye sees into all the worlds. It is possible you opened a door to some other world as well, perhaps the Realm of Dreams, where the God of the Dreams, the Duke of Zhou, holds court. He is lord over the dream-eaters and the nightmare carrion—the Baku.”

“So I shared a dream with Constance?” Jim said. Huang nodded. “How do you know all these things and how can they all be real? The God my ma and pa taught me about? The gods you talk about as if they live down the street. Mutt’s ‘family’—the spirits the Indians talk to all the time. How can all that be?”

Huang opened his palms and gestured about the room. “This world is the stage. Mortals are the performers in the show, and it was written for them. Your world is a house full of doors, Jim. This is part of the reason the eye has such great power, it opens doors.”

“‘Your world,’” Jim said, leaning forward. “Not
our
world. Who are you, Mr. Huang? What are you? How come you never go out of Johnny Town, ever?”

Huang smiled. “Part of the true power of sorcery is opening to understanding and the thrill of discovery. Tell me, Jim, what do you think I am? Tell me.”

Jim regarded him without fear, with calm discernment. “You lead your people,” he said. “No, you protect them. Not just here, all over. But you never leave Golgotha.… You are some kind of guardian for Chinese folks.”

“You are very astute, Jim,” Huang said. “My people have a myth, a legend of a god who shares my name—Ch’eng Huang—the God of Cities, Moats and Walls, Divine Magistrate of Heaven and Earth, God of Ramparts. It is said he is everywhere my people gather in numbers, here in Golgotha and in the railroad camps where my people toil to build the bloodlines of this rowdy, raw, wondrous land. He is in the streets of every Chinatown, and every city, every village in China. He is said to have been born a mortal whose service to his home, his community, elevated him to godhood upon death. Ch’eng Huang protects the homes and businesses of the Chinese people in this new world as he does in their ancient homeland.”

“Are you? You mean to say…,” Jim said.

Huang gestured with open palms.

“I simply tell you a story of my homeland, and the interesting coincidence that I share the name of this divine and magnificent being.”

“So why do you stay in Johnny Town—uh, I mean in your neighborhoods all the time?”

Huang laughed for the first time since Jim had met him. It was a warm and terrible sound all at once.

“Ah, my dear boy, words like ‘Johnny’ mean nothing to me. They only have power to harm or diminish if that is allowed in the mind and heart. People fear the alien, the different. Whites fear my people as my people fear and distrust yours. It is human nature, mortal nature. Never let words wound you, Jim. The core of humanity is too bright, too resolute to bend to fear.

“I remain in the communities of my people because that is where my … authority is absolute. Past those borders other powers hold sway, just as their power diminishes within my realm.”

Jim was quiet. He picked up the eye off the table. “This is really the eye of a god. A god. It’s too much to figure out. Makes my head hurt.”

Huang nodded. “As wise a response to the infinite as any I have encountered. This is a bright new age of mortals. Look at all that has been accomplished … the marvels! You’ve created and changed gods, bent them to your imaginations: electricity, the telegraph, the locomotive, steam power. It’s your time, Jim. The direct interference of other powers in this world, it would only hold you all back.”

“If that’s the case, then why did those monks curse my dad with this damn eye?” Jim asked. “It drove him half crazy, gave him near constant pain and never did a single trick for him, as far as I know. Why do it to him? Why interfere and give him a god’s eye when he was just a simple man, a decent man.”

“As I said before, your father must have been a remarkable man to endure the stress of having something so vast and powerful joined to him physically,” Huang said. “The obvious reason that the monks brought it to America and entrusted it to your father was that it was in danger of falling into the hands of someone who would use the eye’s power for evil. They sought out a good human being, one devoted to life and humanity. They found your father. It was an honor, and a terrible duty.”