The Kunlun Files

Chapter 6: The Ghost on the Bench

The crying stopped, but the person didn't answer. They just stood there, perfectly still. They probably hadn't expected anyone to turn up in a park at this hour — it was well past midnight.

"Have you spent everything in your bank account yet?" I asked.

The figure stirred. Then I saw them bend down and fish a phone out of a small pile of things on the ground.

"If you really mean to die, emptying your own card isn't enough. You should borrow from every lending platform first. Spend it all — the dead don't have to pay it back."

The moment the words left my mouth, I realized my tongue had slipped its leash.

"Forget that. It's the wine talking; don't take it seriously. But I do want to know — why do you want to die?"

As soon as I said it, a shadow appeared on the bench beside me, where a moment ago there had been nothing.

If the wine hadn't slowed my reactions by a few beats, that shadow would have scared me out of my skin. When I saw clearly what sat next to me — a ghost — I relaxed. The ghost looked anxious.

Meeting a ghost in the middle of the night isn't frightening. Meeting a person is.

I remembered what Master Wu had said over wine two nights earlier: *Your mouth sometimes sounds like it's been consecrated — I joked about telling you ghost stories, and now watch yourself out there, in case you actually meet one.*

Was I afraid? Slightly. Not of the ghost. What I feared was this: if that ghost pushed this person into death tonight, and the police pulled the park cameras afterward and found me wandering here at midnight — some things would become very hard to explain.

But I also knew there are no coincidences in this world. If some force had walked me out of my building at midnight and sat me down in this park, in front of someone with a rope — there was a karmic bond here asking to be settled.

People who are about to take their own lives usually have a soul-claiming ghost at their side. The one sitting next to me was probably it, and it felt impatient — impatient to finish this person off.

The figure in red still hadn't spoken.

"Let me guess why you want to die," I said. "Love or money? I'm guessing love. How old are you?"

No answer.

"Keep silent and I'm calling the police."

That did it. The person burst into loud, ugly sobs. "He doesn't want me anymore."

A woman. Young, by the sound.

"He doesn't want you, so you have to die."

"I love him so much. I can't live without him."

"How long have you known him?"

"Seven years."

"And before you knew him — how were you alive then?"

"That's different."

"A person who doesn't even love herself, dreaming that someone else will love her. He dumped you, and you brought it on yourself."

She cried harder. In the dead of night, it was honestly a little chilling.

"Miss. Who else is in your family?"

"No one. After I met him, I didn't even keep any friends."

"So you chose a park because you were afraid that if you died at home, nobody would collect your body. Right?"

"I—"

"That's rather selfish of you. If you die here, plenty of people will never dare walk in this park again. And did you think about whoever finds your body? What if it scars them for life? What if it's a child?"

"I didn't think that far."

"Then start now."

"I'm so confused. My heart hurts so much that breathing hurts. I haven't slept whole nights through."

"Any love that makes you suffer is a love with something wrong in it."

"I just don't understand where we went wrong."

"You lost every friend you had because of him — that's the biggest problem. You'd end your own life for him — that's an even bigger one. And all those problems added together come down to a single problem."

"What problem?"

"You don't love yourself."

"But what can I do? I just love him that much."

She dissolved into wailing again. Talking was getting nowhere. Time to work on the ghost sitting beside me, who had been quietly listening the whole time.

"Why do you want her dead?" I asked it.

The ghost jolted — it clearly hadn't expected me to see it. Then I heard it say, "I don't want her dead. I just wanted her to leave that man."

"So you're the one who broke them up. And then she ran out here to kill herself."

"I truly didn't know it would come to this. I did it for her own good."

"What are you to her?"

"I'm her grandmother. Not by blood — she's the child I raised. I made them break up because that man treats her terribly."

I understood at once.

April. Souls come back from the underworld to see the children they love — and this one found her child drowning in a rotten relationship. So she intervened and split them apart. No blood between them, but there was a debt of raising, and that counts as the shelter of an ancestor all the same. What the grandmother never imagined was that her beloved child would answer the breakup by trying to end everything.

"Your child loves that man too much," I said. "He probably took something that belongs to her. Go back and look — whatever of hers he still has, take it home to her. Do that, and she'll slowly come around."

The ghost wept a thank-you and drifted away.

When it was gone, I said, "You're an orphan, aren't you."

"How do you know that? Do you know me?"

"I don't know you. Your grandmother just told me."

"My grandmother? But she's been dead for years. How could you see her — what are you?"

"Your grandmother loves you very much. The same way you love that man. More, even."

"Grandma—"

"If you ever want a healthy love, learn to love yourself first. That's the only way your grandmother can stop worrying."

"Is she here right now?"

"That doesn't matter. What matters is that she loves you. She wants you to live well. She wants you to be as happy as you were when you were small."

She broke down again. When the crying finally eased, she took a step toward me.

"Don't come over," I said. "Not unless you've given up on dying."

She stopped. "When you talked about my grandmother just now — my head suddenly cleared. I don't know why."

"Don't think about it. Tonight, you and I never met. Go home. Treat it all as a dream."

"Are you a god my grandmother sent to save me?"

"I'm no god. Just someone walking off too much wine."

"Walking off wine," she repeated.

"Go on. Scatter."

The park lamps had gone out long ago. On her way out, I watched her throw the cord into a trash bin. When her figure had disappeared beyond the trees, I stayed on the bench in the dark, waiting for the ghost that had left earlier.

About half an hour later, it came back.

"She doesn't want to die anymore," I said. "She's gone home."

The ghost curled in on itself and began to sob. "But I couldn't find the thing you told me about."

"That man treated your child badly, so you wanted him dead. Didn't you."

"Yes. I wanted him dead."

"That one thought of yours nearly killed your own child."

"How?"

"She loves him that much — her thoughts are full of him, and every one of those thoughts is a layer of protection made of her own energy. It lifts his luck. It shields his life. So whatever you sent at him, she was taking for him. The closer you stayed to her, the stronger her wish to die. The moment you left, it weakened."

The ghost's whole body trembled.

"Karma is never simple," I said. "Some love is not better for being more. Some roads a person has to walk alone. If someone who's fallen doesn't want to get up, anyone who hauls them up is just carrying a pile of soft bones."

"So I almost became it," the ghost whispered. "The ghost that claimed her life."

It stayed curled there on the bench for a long time, weeping without sound. When it finally drifted away into the dark, I went home and slept what was left of the night.

The next morning, on my way out, someone spoke to me.

I had passed him a hundred times — an old presence that lingered near where I lived. He always just watched me with a smile. I never greeted him first, and he had never once opened his mouth to me.

Today, he spoke.