A Short Story Collection with Non-Human Protagonists - Chapter 19

Chapter 19: Tata and the Girl

The second transaction between Tata and Zheng Xinyan began on a sweltering afternoon in Bangkok.

Click.

Someone opened the rusted lock. The lights flickered.

Tata grew out from the darkness of that dilapidated wooden box. Tata saw the grayish-blue sky outside the window, the water stains on the bathroom mirror, and the woman reunited with Him.

The woman was in her twenties, with a darker complexion. Her eyebrows slanted toward her temples, and her gaze was young yet resolute—like a female wolf that had just emerged from the rainforest. She wore a white shirt with two buttons undone, revealing a beautiful collarbone line, her chest slightly dampened by sweat.

“Hello, Shay…” Tata called her nickname in a voice like mist.

They had not met for twelve years. But to Tata, time held no meaning.

Zheng Xinyan stared at Him, speaking in a tone that was almost a command: “I have a very troublesome case on my hands. I need you to tell me the name of the killer.”

This fearless, beautiful human dared to offend the elusive shadow-like creature before her—an existence far older than any life on this planet.

But Tata was not angry. Tata would not get angry at a human, just as a human would not get angry at an ant.

“Oh, let me see your case…” Over endless spans of time, Tata had learned a thousand human tongues.

The murky shadows gathered into a tentacle, reaching toward the woman’s arm resting on the sink. Her wheat-colored skin covered long, tight muscles and many vibrant, healthy blood vessels. The tentacle gripped Zheng Xinyan’s wrist, tasting everything Tata wanted to know from her sweat.

Oh, it was indeed a horrifying serial murder case.

People were dying. People were losing their heads.

The director of a top private hospital: his body waited outside the operating room, but his head was placed atop the cross symbol at the hospital entrance.

A member of parliament who believed in Buddhism: piously prostrating beneath a pagoda, his head wearing a jasmine garland, becoming an ornament before the incense burner.

A star judge sat tall on the bench, while the scales held by the Statue of Justice measured two items—the code of law on one side, and the judge’s head on the other.

No surveillance, no fingerprints, no witnesses. The police investigation had reached a dead end.

Tata withdrew His tentacle and laughed. His laughter echoed in the small space like a tropical cyclone laden with grit. The truth was interesting, but also a bit troublesome. Tata didn’t want to help, so He intended to demand a sufficiently strange price to make this lady detective back away.

“…The price I want is a kiss from you.”

Tata saw the detective’s eyebrows furrow slightly, her eyes revealing undisguised shock. Exactly as Tata expected.

Snap.

The woman closed the lid of the wooden box.

Tata remembered many things.

He remembered the arduous journey to Earth, the migration of time and glaciers, and how the priests wove life into offerings, praying for Tata to dwell within the wooden box carved with incantations and to stop interfering in human affairs.

He remembered the first transaction between Tata and Zheng Xinyan.

In the orphanage of Hekou City, in that attic almost buried in cobwebs and dust, fourteen-year-old Zheng Xinyan opened that ancient wooden box. Something black crawled out—thick fog, asphalt, or a shadow losing its silhouette.

Tata stretched His body that had slept for many years and greeted the fourteen-year-old girl: “Hello, human…”

The girl, as fresh and fragile as a frangipani in the morning mist, widened her eyes in surprise. “What… what kind of thing are you?”

Oh, how should Tata answer? He could not downgrade Himself into any noun a human could understand.

“Who I am is not important…” Tata saw the scars and bruises on the girl’s arms and easily guessed her situation. “What matters is that I can grant you any wish.”

Tata condensed nothingness into a tentacle, gently reaching toward the girl’s fingers. The girl did not dodge. Good.

From the touch, Tata could see all of the past.

The girl was born into an ordinary merchant family. Her parents had once crossed the sea to come to this country, only to die in a shipwreck many years later. They left her two names full of love: Zheng Xinyan, and Shay.

Her uncle seized the inheritance that should have gone to Zheng Xinyan and sent her to an orphanage in the suburbs. Zheng Xinyan was a misfit there. She was too beautiful and too cold; those dark, resilient eyes seemed to despise everyone she did not wish to associate with.

Ungoverned bullies have many ways to torment those who are different. They tore her favorite rabbit doll to shreds; after she sewed the pieces back together, they threw it into a mud pit. They beat her, humiliated her, put out cigarette butts on her back, and forced her to swallow rice covered in chalk dust. They stole her underwear, wrote the most vicious words on it, and hung it from the orphanage windows. They locked her in this abandoned, haunted attic.

Oh, Tata understood—they were demons who hadn’t grown horns yet.

What made the “demons” utterly furious was that Zheng Xinyan never cried. She was a very, very strong child, as if nothing in this world could break her.

“Make a wish to me…” Tata whispered into the ear of the poor fourteen-year-old girl. “No matter the wish, I will satisfy you.”

The girl clenched her fists, took a deep breath, and spoke the sentence Tata had long awaited.

“Make them… stop bothering me.”

Good. Now it was Tata’s turn to name the price. This was His favorite part. The shadows surrounded the girl, gathering and scattering lightly, circling her.

“The price I want is… Krade… your rabbit.”

Tata knew how important this rabbit doll was to the girl. Soft, wearing a beret, Krade was the only luggage she had brought from home besides herself. It was the last gift her mother had given her. Every night, the girl slept holding Krade. She had sewn every wound on Krade’s body and spent an entire afternoon washing the mud from it.

Yes, Tata enjoyed watching the moment humans gave up what they loved. That subtle, never-to-be-replicated sense of brokenness fascinated Him.

The small girl remained silent for a long time. Sunlight filtered through the small roof window into the attic, trembling in the depths of her eyes. Tata heard the sound of her breath as she made up her mind.

“Deal.”

Good. Very good. Tata smiled and opened the attic door for her.

“Eat your dinner and sleep well. Tomorrow morning, when you open your eyes, your wish will come true.”

Oh, when the beautiful night descended and moonlight shrouded the banana grove, Tata began to show His skills.

That night, no one splashed water on her, and no one threw rats or toads into her bed. The girl held her rabbit and, for once, had a good night’s sleep. But when she opened her eyes, she found everything had gone into chaos.

The soft Krade with the beret had vanished from her arms.

Every child who had bullied her had lost their sanity overnight. It was as if something had slipped into their skulls and stolen their brains. They used knives to cut the hands they had used to hurt Zheng Xinyan. They used their teeth to bite the tongues they had used to insult her. They cried, laughed, and screamed all at once. They dug a giant hole in the yard, saying they would bury Hekou City in the center of the earth. They knelt with their backs to the church icons and wrote on the floor with their own blood:

Tata. Tata. Tata.

Other than repeating that syllable, they completely lost the ability to speak.

Zheng Xinyan stood there, watching them go hysterically mad, unable to tell for a moment whether she was the victim, the bystander, the accomplice, or the suspect in this story. The orphanage administrators panicked, sent the children to psychiatric hospitals, and fled the area.

Years later, Zheng Xinyan heard that the children who went mad in that bizarre incident had finally slowly recovered, barely resuming normal lives. But one must never mention the Hekou City orphanage or a certain specific name in front of them.

After the orphanage closed, Zheng Xinyan went to many places. She was taken home by her uncle, she got into university, and she became a police officer. That wooden box remained hidden in the lining of her suitcase, becoming the unspeakable secret in her heart.

Human life is always difficult. Zheng Xinyan encountered countless hardships. Her uncle lost the family fortune at the gambling table; when drunk, he always tried to whip the “bad luck” off her with a belt, continuing for years until he died of alcoholism. During a daunting Bangkok midsummer, she handed out flyers for two whole months, only to have her hard-earned tuition stolen at gunpoint by thugs the day before school started. She worked and studied, hitting the cake shop every night until late, where the boss framed her for mislabeling ingredients and docked a month’s pay.

But, even so.

Zheng Xinyan never summoned Tata again. She seemed determined never to seek help from that eerie creature beyond human comprehension—if Tata could even be called a creature. Under the grinding of a thousand types of pain, Zheng Xinyan forged for herself an indestructible suit of armor to face this treacherous world alone. She took the wooden box from the orphanage not even to possess Tata’s power. She simply realized that if this thing fell into the hands of a bad person, the consequences would be terrifying and irreversible.

Until twelve years later, when that shocking mystery that shook the entire country occurred in Bangkok. The investigation stalled week after week with no progress, and the police department faced immense pressure from the public and the authorities. The entire Major Crimes Unit was at their wits’ end, on the verge of collapse.

Zheng Xinyan finally remembered Tata.

That afternoon, just as Tata was curling back into the darkness of the wooden box to rest peacefully, dim light leaked in through the gap. Zheng Xinyan opened the box once more—

The beautiful detective closed her eyes, leaned in close, and began to kiss the shadow residing in the wooden box.

Oh, things just got bad. This was the first time Tata had ever been kissed by a human. This taste was… d*mn sweet.