The Burning

identical black shapes in every one of the windows facing the street. It had to be mold ... but the shapes looked like shadows or silhouettes of people, and out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw one of them move. She quickly turned away. 'Come on,' she said. 'Drive. Fast.'

Derek started the car, pulled away from the curb, heading up the street toward the hulking mountains that towered over the city. 'Where?' he asked.

'It all started in that tunnel,' she said, 'with that ... zombie. Let's go to the police station, find the policeman, see what he knows. He was there. He saw what really happened.'

'What's his name?'

'I don't know, but it should be easy to find out.'

Her cell phone rang, and Angela took it out of her purse, surprised. She peered at the small screen, but the number was blocked so she couldn't see who it was. She pressed the button to answer. 'Hello?'

It was Edna Wong.

She wanted to talk.

* * *

They met in a little downtown health food restaurant called Mountain Oasis. There was no privacy, but these were the off-hours and the only other patron was a gray-bearded Karl Marx look-alike who was eating soup while he read an impressively thick book through depressingly thick eyeglasses.

Angela and Derek were already in the neighborhood and arrived ten minutes before Edna, who had to fight the traffic from NAU. The old woman walked through the doorway just as their decaf iced teas were being refilled, and Angela waved her over. She and Derek had been sitting at the table in virtual silence, trying to decompress, to absorb what had happened, unable to talk yet about what they'd seen.

They were seated opposite each other, and Edna took a chair from an adjoining table and sat down facing both of them. 'You want to know about the tunnel,' she said without preamble.

'Yes,' Angela told her. Derek nodded.

'Okay, then.' The housing administrator took a deep breath. 'I only know rumors. Maybe they're true, maybe not. Maybe they're just stories. But I'll tell you what I heard.

'When I was a little girl, Flagstaff was an almost completely white city. Oh, you'd see Indians in town from time to time, but it wasn't like today. The state's Hispanic population all seemed to live down by Tucson and never ventured above Phoenix, and I'd never even seen anyone who was African-American. As far as I knew, there were only three Asian families in town, including mine.

'The thing was, it had not always been this way. At one time, in the early 1900s, after the railroad came in, after they'd built the station, there were quite a few Chinese families living here, doing the work no one else wanted to do.' She smiled ruefully. 'Coolie labor. But there was as much anti-immigrant sentiment then as there is today, more probably, and a lot of locals were resentful, claiming that the Chinese were taking jobs away from white Arizonans.'

The waitress stopped by, pad in hand, and Edna smiled at her. 'Just water, please.'

'Sure thing,' the girl said cheerfully.

'I'll leave a big tip,' Edna promised.

The waitress laughed. 'Don't worry about it.'

'Anyway,' Edna continued, 'there were some beatings and a few scattered attacks. Tarring and feathering. An attempted lynching. Flagstaff was still considered the wild frontier back then, and lawlessness and vigilantism were not unknown in these parts. Some people could see the writing on the wall, and a few of the local businesses who relied heavily on cheap Chinese labor created 'safe rooms' just in case.' She paused. 'And tunnels.'

'Is that-?' Angela began.

Edna nodded. 'Yes. At least, that's what I was told. Eventually, there were riots, anti-Chinese riots. Stores and businesses that hired Chinese workers were looted; rooming houses and shacks where they boarded were burned. There was thousands of dollars' worth of damage, dozens of injuries, and several people died. None of them were Chinese, though. This part's documented. You can look it up in newspaper articles from that time in the university library. I have.'

The waitress brought her water, and Edna thanked the girl, taking a long sip. 'The Chinese workers and their families all seemed to have disappeared. No one knew what had happened to them. Eventually, after things had calmed down, a few were found working at the hotel or at the mill. Supposedly they'd hidden in the secret rooms and the tunnels while all the chaos was going on above. But many of the families never returned, and the story passed down to me was that

later, maybe at night when it was safe, they'd left the city. The rumor was that they'd ridden the rails east.'

Angela suddenly understood. 'But they didn't leave,' she said, stunned. 'They never left the tunnel. They died in there. That's what we saw.'

Edna nodded soberly. 'But there were tunnels' she said. 'Plural. At least that's what I heard. So ...' She trailed off.

'So there could be more,' Derek said.

'Yes.'

He looked down at the floor. 'There could be bodies under us right now.'

'They were supposed to be somewhere in this downtown district,' Edna agreed.

Angela suddenly felt a lot less secure. With all of the gangs and violence and big-city problems of Los Angeles, she thought she'd be living a peaceful bucolic little life here in northern Arizona. She never could have imagined something like this. 'But-' Her voice came out thin and cracked, and she cleared her throat. 'But they were moving,' she said. 'At least some of them were. That one hand grabbed me. And what's that black mold? We tried to have it tested, but it doesn't even show up. It's not there. So it has to be some kind of magic or something. Is there some sort of curse on those tunnels and the people who died there? Or is it ...? I don't know. What is it?'

'That I can't tell you,' Edna said. 'All I know is that the tunnels were supposed to be part of an underground railroad for Chinese immigrants to protect them from vigilante mobs. Beyond that, I'm as much in the dark as you. But I thought knowing about the history might help you somehow or at least give you a place to start.'

'Thank you,' Angela said. But she wasn't sure it did help.

Edna thought for a moment, then sighed. 'Well, maybe there is something else. I don't know. But I'll tell you anyway.' She took another long sip of water. 'When I was a little girl, my uncle came to visit us from Missouri. He was very tall for someone who was Chinese, very charismatic. He had some kind of glamorous job, although I don't remember what it was* Anyway, he stayed for about a week and it was wonderful. But one day, my parents were out somewhere and my uncle asked me to show him where my grandfather was buried. It wasn't in a real cemetery, since Chinese weren't allowed to be buried with Caucasian^ at that time. It was a makeshift cemetery out on the north end of town that was shared with other outcasts^ Indians had their own burial grounds, but the rest of us, the other minority groups-and there were only a handful of families all total-made do with this little plot in the forest, a little clearing of unowned land. My uncle bought a chicken first and put it in this black bag. I thought that was very odd. I kept asking him what he was going to do with it. I was fascinated| really. But he wouldn't say. Then when I showed him my grandfather's grave, he knelt down before it and started doing some kind of ... ritual is the only word to describe it. He started whispering some sort of chant-I knew some of the words but not all of them-then he took out the chicken and slit its throat! He let the blood drip on the grave, then put his fingers in it. He wrote some Chinese characters on the gravestone-I couldn't read yet, so I don't know what he wrote-then he put some blood on his forehead! stood up and bowed. Two words I remember he did say were 'bo sau.' Revenge. He gave me a lecture and told me my mother and father should be doing this, loo. We all should. But I got scared and started crying, and then he picked me up and then we left.

'When I told my mother about it, I remember she seemed scared. I think she even shivered, although that may just be my memory. But what she said was, He's trying to raise the dead.' That was enough to scare me, and it's all we ever said about it. My uncle left the next day, and I never knew if that was why, if my parents kicked him out or he stormed off, but he never came back to visit.

'I know my parents were never involved in any such thing, and I've never heard of anything else like it since. But my uncle said all good Chinese should perform that ritual, and I've thought about that