Tian yanked Adeline back before she could slap him, although she flipped the grinning man off. “Don’t pick a fight,” she said tersely as she pushed Adeline through the door into a dark hall filled with music.
“He said—”
“I know. But this is their ground. Unless they actually hurt you, it’s not worth it.”
Adeline’s fuming turned into a blush as she laid eyes on the stage, the only source of light in the room. The dancers upon it wore gauzy,glittery wings, and apart from that, only veils and thin undergarments that looked like skin, with moons and stars sewn over generous curves and artfully between their legs. The effect was quite convincing, and they moved sensually enough to convince further still.
But beneath the music there was another set of sounds: the hard cracking of shells, the wet squelch of lifting sauces and lips, and, all around, chewing, chewing, chewing. Adeline’s eyes adjusted and she saw that the patrons circling the stage were gorging. The innermost seats left for spirits, lit by the spill from the stage, were the only indicators of what the platters on each table had first looked like: meat roasted and dripping, rice dumplings in banana leaves, plum sauces and salt crusts, fruits in vivid pinks and reds. Elsewhere, under the hands of human guests, the banquet spreads had been turned into smears of bones and sticky sauces amidst wine cups. The audience ate and watched and ate—it was too dim to make out anything but the whites of their eyes and masticating teeth.
“Don’t touch anything,” Hsien said, as the Butterflies took a table in the back. “They’re drugged, and you pay for what you eat.”
Adeline stared at the food before her, shadowed mounds in the shapes of delicacies. The smell should have been overpowering. Instead it only smelled of leaves and perfume. She could have put some in her mouth and only swallowed air, like the fluttering of the dancers’ veils.
“What kind of societyisthis?”
“They used to be religious, if you can believe that.” Unexpectedly this came from Christina, who shrugged. “I’ve heard from older tattooists. The Long Night was a sect in Foshan that saw themselves as counterparts to the ghosts. During ghost month, while the spirits passed into the mortal world, they were supposedly able to enter hell. During this period their members wouldn’t leave the ceremonial hall for the entire month. They wouldn’t eat or see sunlight, and they would only drink a special tea brewed from river water. I suppose at some point some members sailed over here and set up a branch.
“Then supposedly, during the war, the society’s leader went mad during the Long Night and slaughtered eighteen of his brothers in the confinement. He was killed by the nineteenth, who walked out of the Night early and claimed the whole society had been a lie, and that their new mandate was to host the spirits instead of trying to usurp them. At the time, a café here in Great World started putting on getai performances, and they were becoming more popular. The survivor, calling himself the Prince Who Woke, decided to take this idea on. By the time he passed it to his nephew, Kwek Luo Man, the society was about entertainment. The only thing they kept is the tea and the hunger—in a way.”
“It’s the best food you will ever eat,” Hsien said darkly. “And you won’t be able to stop until the night ends.”
Whatever they’d been given outside was beginning to take hold. Adeline recognized the edges of a ravenous hunger. “Watch the show instead,” Tian advised. “One of them is Lilian.”
After the war, the getai had started becoming steadily more risqué, adding stripteases to the roster of singers and dancers for the dead until the police—and the Buddhists, and the YMCA—started coming around to clamp down on immoralities. Eventually the authorities had caught up and most companies were forced to go decent to stay in business, but the Long Night flirted with regulation and put out decadence after decadence: the music finished with a wail, but there was no applause, no whistles, only the continued sound of chewing and cutlery scraping, tearing meat, and squelching sauces in the dark, as if the guests had only one thing to do on this mortal plane.
Adeline felt sickened, and her mouth watered, and she felt even sicker. Tian pressed a sweet into her hand, smuggled in, and she sucked at the milky sugars like it was a banquet in itself. Tian had tried to describe Lilian to her, but behind the veils, the dancers could all have been the same.
Finally the troupe fluttered off the stage, cascading spotlightscatching costume stars. As a dancer circled their table, Tian suddenly caught her by the waist and tugged her in to whisper in her ear. They had a quick exchange that ended with the woman brushing Tian’s shoulder and flitting off for her exit. Adeline thought she was a prancing show-off and that anyway her costume was ridiculous. Tian reached for Christina, looking pleased. “Did you know Meishan joined the Long Night?”
“Oh, of course, I thought she looked familiar…”
A server in pale silk glided up to them, black hair flowing over slim white wrists that bore a silver tray. She spoke to Hsien and Hsien only, and when she left, Hsien was pursing her lips. “The Prince is asking me over.” She nodded at the dais in the corner that Adeline hadn’t paid much attention to. Now she saw the group up there, watching the entire hall.
As though on cue, a lamp came on, illuminating the Prince of Night. He was handsome in an oil-slick sort of way, longish hair and green satin shirt open to the second button. Even as they noticed him, the Prince rose from his seat.
“My friends, thank you for coming!” His voice echoed over the now-empty stage, ringing its perimeter and seeming to hollow it out until the hollowness itself became solid in anticipation. “It is the last night of the seventh month. My uncle has always reminded me that though we dine and dance with ghosts now, we must remember what they are. We must remember how close they are, and that this is a festival to think of death.”
The music picked up anew. Smoke began to fill the center of the stage, white and almost sweet to smell. Adeline found herself staring at the unspooling waves with the intense sense that something was about to emerge from them. Was it her, or did the food on the spirits’ tables look like it had been reduced? Adeline’s stomach tightened, wanting. As something moved amidst the smoke, the Prince lifted a hand. His lamp extinguished, and the show resumed.
This time, a low erhu began somewhere in the dark. Then, from the smoke, now only present in its thickness and sweetness, white figures rose like snakes. Only their dusted limbs and lightly silvered dresses and porcelain white masks shone vaguely in the otherwise pitch-black. With unease, enchantment, and a renewed hunger, Adeline bit her cheek and watched the ghosts sway to the thrumming strings. A drum joined in, and then another set of strings, and then a clear flute. She hadn’t seen any musicians.
A host of smooth shining faces and streaming powdered bodies began to bloom outward from their wellspring, coming closer and closer to the audience. Adeline smelled ash and jasmine and just the hint of sweat, which of all things reminded her it was simply a show. And yet, as savor built on her tongue, it was difficult not to believe it was real anyway. A voice like syrup wine began climbing the music, singing something of forgetting.
One of the dancers returned to spirit Tian away. Lilian? Another ghost skimmed the other end of the table, but it was impossible to tell if anyone else was taken. The tent was a slow mirage of silvers. There was a story being told, but Adeline couldn’t quite decipher it. Something with a pulse. Instrument strings stretched into the emptiness within her. She reached for the fruit in front of her and then pulled away, biting again on the inside of her cheeks, unable to stop.
They were descending, Adeline thought, tasting blood. A hand brushed the back of her neck and she whirled, saw a contorting dancer tilt their enamel face toward her and point toward the stage as a spotlight flashed. In its capture was a naked woman with a python wrapped around her. The anonymous singer wailed over their heads. The ghosts—the demons?—circled the audience again and again, weaving a web, drawing tighter.
Punishment, Adeline realized.Judgment.
Out of the corner of her eye there was another flare of light. Except this one came from the floor and not the ceiling. It was toofar back and didn’t illuminate a dancer at all, and it was followed a second later by a sharp, splitting bang.
Fire winked from across the table, revealing Pek Mun on her feet. “Gunshot,” she hissed, more alarmed than Adeline had ever seen her. Around them, even the eaters had paused, heads lifted like startled rabbits, everyone breathing, breathing, breathing, unsure whether they had all imagined it. The whites of their eyes now dotted the dark like stars.
Just one shot. Some private conflict. At the next table over, Adeline saw a man reach for his chopsticks again, about to discard the disturbance, wanting to eat again.
Then light flared from the same direction, wild and bright, and another shot rang out. Finally someone shouted, “Fire!”
The room erupted. Chairs scraped as people jumped up, pushing blindly toward an exit they couldn’t see. “Lights!” someone else bellowed. “Light the lanterns!” But the stampede continued, no wits and no lighters.
