reactormag.com
Don’t Put That Thing in Your Mouth: Nghi Vo’s “What the Dead Know”
Books
Reading the Weird
Don’t Put That Thing in Your Mouth: Nghi Vo’s “What the Dead Know”
A woman posing as a medium who can channel the spirit world comes face to face with the truth…
By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth
|
Published on July 2, 2025
Comment
0
Share New
Share
Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Nghi Vo’s “What the Dead Know,” first published in 2022 as an Amazon Original. Spoilers ahead!
Fogg River, Illinois, 1899:
A train pulls into the station ahead of a winter storm, unceremoniously disgorging two passengers. Vasyl Janiv denies he won enough to have been booted as the cardsharp he is. Maryse Ly supposes she was the problem. This far north, people see few Vietnamese, but she certainly doesn’t pass as a white woman.
The town’s main street is unpaved. From the station platform, the pair can see the river itself, swollen and furious. Maryse grew up by the Mississippi, hearing the murmurs of its drowned. Fogg River hosts its own dead, one of whom briefly flings an arm above the waves. There are water women everywhere.
A buggy arrives, driven by a sharp-faced woman: Miss Nina Parley, from the Fogg River Seminary for Young Ladies, where they’ve been hired to perform as occultists. Snow starts falling as they enter the drive. Maryse gasps at “hearts snagged in the branches, red and dripping.” But they’re merely salt-dough holiday ornaments. Maryse fights her unease. If she and Vasyl bailed on every job that spooked her, she’d be back to selling dances.
The Seminary is a dignified edifice. Well-dressed guests and servants crowd its foyer. Girls answer guests’ questions, like circus animals. Their heads are crowned by charmed fireflies. A man with a bristling mustache seizes Maryse’s elbow and speculates about her origins. She plays dumb, as she supposedly speaks no English. Vasyl rescues her.
The headmistress, Nina’s mother, gives a speech: for fifty years the Seminary has formed girls into “diligent young women” fit to serve their husbands and communities. Not only do they learn household magic, they’re also taught to tend posthouses and send telegrams!
Maryse and Vasyl prepare the school library for their performance. Maryse checks for traps planted to catch fakes, but no listening imps lurk. She changes into her costume: an extravagantly draped dress made from stolen bordello curtains. She tucks the contents of a chamois bag into her cheek, then lies corpse-like on a table. Guests gather as Vasyl warns that his companion, the priestess of a forbidden religion whom he purchased out of a Saigon market, “lies on the border between life and death.” They must be quiet, or she may slip away forever!
Vasyl proves she’s in “the trance of her ancestors” by fake-needling her cheek while bursting a blood-red ink capsule. Now she can listen for the dead, and pass on their answers to the guests’ questions. Maryse works the audience, responding gutturally to some, ignoring others with moans and head-tosses. The mustached man asks how Hell looks, at which Maryse enacts a fit. “Ask anything else,” Vasyl cries. Headmistress Parley speaks up: “Where’s my daughter gone?”
Maryse tenses her body, so she looks like she’s floating. The spirits are bringing her back, Vasyl explains, cueing Maryse to sit bolt upright, clutch her throat, then spit out the three amber stones from her cheek. On them, the pair have carved vague spirit-reassurances: Heaven, love, mercy. But a fourth stone sticks in Maryse’s throat, nearly suffocating her before she chokes it out.
The next minute, Nina’s giving her sherry. Mrs. Parley reads the stones aloud: “Here. Here. Here.” As Maryse stares, the electric lights explode. Already-unnerved guests scream.
The storm has caused the electrical failure. High snowdrifts cut off travel. Dorm rooms are found for married couples and Maryse, while the single men bed down in classrooms. A handful of fireflies serve for a night-light.
Maryse is roused when someone tries her doorknob. The lock holds, the would-be intruder leaves, but Maryse knows she won’t be able to sleep again. She gathers the fireflies and searches out Vasyl. He’s not surprised when she crawls onto his pallet-bed. He says that earlier the town doctor shared whiskey and local gossip: Mrs. Parley’s older daughter, the telegraph teacher, ran off with some man that summer, hence the question from the performance.
On her way back to her room, Maryse sees the mustached man slip into the corridor, a paper packet in his hands. He orders her to “Come here.” Maryse immediately flees. The man pursues. She gets out a window, but the drop to the snowy ground wrenches her knee, and she can only hobble to a building at the edge of the woods. She ducks inside and finds the school’s telegraph office. Its machine begins to clack without a visible operator. Her pursuer breaks in. The telegraph distracts him. In the light of a dozen fireflies, Maryse now sees a woman at the machine, her hair and dress soaked, smelling of rotting fish and mud.
When the woman seizes the man by the throat, Maryse recognizes her from the library. It wasn’t Nina but Nina’s dead sister Emma, who twists the man’s head violently. As Emma drags the man’s corpse outside, Nina appears. “My sister,” she confirms numbly.
Nina clutches the final stone that choked Maryse. The word on it is “Adley.” He was Emma’s faithless lover and murderer, come to this gathering to recover letters he’d written her. Nina gathers the telegraph tape and translates Emma’s message: “Here. Hate. Hate. Dead. Always dead. Dead forever. Pain. Cold. Cold. River. Cold. Hate. Hate. Hate you. Die. Die. Hate you.”
When Nina wonders why Adley killed Emma, Maryse says there are as many reasons as there are women in the water.
At the train station, Maryse thinks she sees a white hand waving again from the river. After five years as a medium, Maryse finally knows what the dead speak of.
What’s Cyclopean: The Fogg river “bowed to the Mississippi, but it did not understand the sovereignty of bridges or trains.”
The Degenerate Dutch: Maryse passes as an exotic priestess from an unnamed country that echoes “with the roars of man-eating lions.” This invites leers with varying levels of hazard, but no one seriously questions the story.
Weirdbuilding: Harry Houdini, in our world, was a stage magician and skeptic who tried to disprove mediums because he so desperately wanted them to be real. In Maryse’s world, he may or may not be “descended from eighteen generations of Jewish magicians.” Note that Kabballah does not, generally speaking, have a ton of applications in escape artistry.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
An effective con hinges on telling people what they want to believe. You’re smarter than everyone else. Here’s an easy way to make tons of money. Your beloved dead are safe and well in the afterlife, and want you to know that everything is okay.
The danger of running a con is getting convinced that you’re smarter than everyone else, that you’ve found an easy way to make tons of money—and that the dead are never going to contradict you.
Like poor Alison in Beyond Black, Maryse walks the line between comforting con and discomfiting actual mediumship. The similarity ends there, however. Maryse has a better balance with Vasyl than Alison with Colette, and thought—until this story—that she was entirely and safely on the “con” side of the line. This despite living in a world with drowned “water women” haunting every river, dinner guests who’ve sold their souls, and enchanted fireflies haloing the heads of schoolgirls.
These details tantalize: what does it mean that a common etiquette quandary involves seating assignments for a clergyman and a servant of the devil? Why did you invite them both in the first place?
I have a sneaking suspicion that the murderer-harasser who asks for intel on Hell… may have a personal interest in the answer. So perhaps you invited the soul-seller because you didn’t know his peccadillos. Why one would reveal such things at the dinner table remains a mystery to be answered by a very different sort of story. Which Vo, who’s elsewhere riffed on The Great Gatsby and stuck a storytelling archivist in a room with man-eating tigers (not lions), would also be well-qualified to write.
The fireflies, too, are intriguing. The spell ultimately kills them, either by draining their energy or just keeping them from eating all night. It’s a piece of quiet cruelty masquerading as innocent charm. That seems appropriate, and fits well with a seminary school that would draw funders not only with its students’ domestic party tricks, but with imported table-knockers.
Or perhaps the séance also had an ulterior motive: perhaps Mrs. Parley’s suspected Emma’s fate.
The answer, like so many provided by the actual dead, is not comforting. Not only because Emma is dead, but because the dead know so little. No mercy preserved in this amber, only the hate and pain of a girl’s last moments. Only vengeance, and an answer—at least for one murderer—to the question about hell.
Which leaves the water women, and their sister victims in other elements, no dramatically moral afterlife of their own. Only the thing that killed them, forever.
Anne’s Commentary
My search results for Vietnamese immigration to Louisiana prior to 1900 were mainly productive of redirection to the significant influx that followed the Vietnam War. However, in An Ethnic Geography of New Orleans, Richard Campanella provides these observations by nineteenth-century travelers:
“No city perhaps on the globe,” wrote one visitor in 1816, “presents a greater contrast of national manners, language, and complexion, than does New Orleans.” Marveled another in 1835, “Truly does New-Orleans represent every other city and nation upon earth. I know of none where is congregated so great a variety of the human species.” “What a hubbub!” gushed another visitor, “what an assemblage of strange faces [and] distinct people!”
So why couldn’t Maryse’s family have been part of the “assemblage”? Perhaps the Mississippi River’s Delta reminded them of the Mekong’s, only with alligators instead of Estuarine and Siamese crocodiles. A delta without crocodilians is like a day without orange juice, or something like that. A river without water women, likewise, would be no fun at all for lovers of weird tales.
In Vietnamese folklore, the Mekong River is strongly associated with the ma da, the ghosts of people who have drowned in its waters, but as Maryse tells Vasyl, ma da can be found everywhere, in any body of water deep enough to claim victims. Drowning due to some act of violence may create especially angry and vengeful ma da. All are apparently trapped in the waters where they died; some lore has it that a ma da is enslaved to the lord or god of those waters, unable to pass on to the next plane of existence until it can lure another person to his or her drowning, thus “tagging” that fresh victim to take its place.
Mrs. Parley needs a spirit medium in order to find her daughter, Emma. Emma needs a spirit medium to communicate with her family. Maryse has five years of experience to offer them. Too bad that experience is as a fake medium, working with a fake spiritualist. Maryse and Vasyl have polished their act to a highly convincing shine and learned how to avoid the skeptics’ traps, damn that Houdini, but the pair are still fakes. Or are they? Specifically, is Maryse a fake? It seems she needn’t be a fraud in Vo’s subtly tweaked world where ghosts are real, a seminary for young ladies can teach household magic without visitors raising their well-groomed eyebrows, and enchanted fireflies make both festive headwear and useful flashlights.
Maryse may just need the right situation, the complementary need, to bloom her latent psi gift. Abused-by-men medium, meet man-murdered ghost: Now, channel Emma the energy to manifest on dry land and make payback hell for her killer. Emma’s faithless lover gets to die; you, Maryse, get to live on a wiser woman, if a sadder one—one who knows what the dead have to say.
If Emma were a ma da of legend, she’d be free to move on now that she’s provided the river with a substitute haunt in Adley. Is the wave she gives Maryse from the flooding Fogg one of grateful farewell? Is it any salute at all, or just a random flail from a spirit still condemned to hate, pain, cold, dead, dead forever, only now with company in her misery?
I don’t know the answer to that question. I do know this:
Mediums! Do NOT put any objects in your mouth when you’re about to go into a trance and grunt-gabble answers to audience requests. This precaution goes double if you’re likely to do a lot of showy (or authentic) writhing and head-tossing! Those objects are DYING to pop out of your cheek pouch and lodge in your windpipe! Or if you insist on risking dry-land asphyxiation, make sure your partner has the Heimlich maneuver down pat.
Don’t worry about ghost-provided mouth-projectiles. They’ll always pop out at the most dramatic moment.
Next week, we explore just how much can be learned from a one-sentence chapter in Chapters 36-46 of The Night Guest.[end-mark]
The post Don’t Put That Thing in Your Mouth: Nghi Vo’s “What the Dead Know” appeared first on Reactor.
New Posts (Home)
ChatBox
Popular Posts 
Game Zone
Top PodCasts
