by Anbara Salam
She approached the bed, climbing in and spilling a hot drop of wax on to his kneecap. ‘They’re standing outside,’ she whispered, settling back on his pillow. ‘Max, please make them go away!’
‘Who’s outside? Sweetheart, you were dreaming,’ he said softly, patting her on her shoulder, and taking the candle from her, placing it on the floor by the bed. He brushed back a wisp of hair from her forehead. Her face was warm and puffy from sleep.
‘It’s not a dream! They’re out there, look for yourself!’ She pulled his sheets over her chin and gestured for him to go into her bedroom.
He picked up the candle, and walked across the corridor to Bea’s room. As soon as he approached her doorway, he blew out the candle. She wasn’t wrong. He could hear people talking in the garden. How had he not noticed the noise before?
Through Bea’s bedroom window, he could see the half-illuminated figures of a dozen people standing in a line. One of them was carrying a hurricane lamp, several others held candles. It was some girls from the church. They were singing a hymn, and a girl’s voice was chanting monotonously from the right-hand side. He saw, through the cracks in the bamboo, faint glimmers of light extending almost all round the house. He backed out of Bea’s room and into his bedroom, where Bea sat with her knees drawn up to her chin.
‘Did you see? Are they still there?’ she asked.
Max shut the door to his bedroom. ‘Yes, they’re still there. Don’t be frightened, though – they’re praying for protection.’
‘Are you sure? Why aren’t they praying for your protection, then?’ She gripped her knees.
‘They’re doing it for us all in turn – don’t worry!’ He did his best to smile a light-hearted smile.
Bea breathed out, screwing her nose up. ‘It’s a very inconvenient time.’
Max laughed, and climbed into bed next to her. He unfolded his knees to allow her cold, muddy feet into the inside of his thighs, for warming up.
‘I don’t like it,’ Bea said, holding on to him like a vice until she fell asleep.
Max lay there while she slept. He listened to the sound of the hymn die out, as Aru’s voice clearly and carefully cast Satan out from Mission House.
18
Max’s fever came from nowhere. He had complained of a headache one night, and gone to his bed early, before it was even dark outside. Early the next morning, Bea found him there, lying flat on his back. He was very still, and for a few ghastly seconds, Bea thought he was dead. She pulled back armfuls of his mosquito net, and put her right hand on his cheek. He opened his eyes a fraction, and she breathed a great hiccup of relief. His face was flushed, coated in a polish of sweat, and the sheets over him were wet to the touch. Bea twisted the mosquito net into a rope, knotted it as high as she could reach, and sat gingerly on the edge of the bed. She held his hot wrist and felt his pulse, but its dim beating didn’t mean anything to her. It was just something the nurses used to do.
‘Maxis, are you ill?’ she said, peering at his face.
His eyebrows pulled together in a wince. ‘It’s quite hot,’ he exhaled.
She stood up again, stripped off the top sheet and dropped it to the floor. Leaning over him, she coaxed off his shirt and trousers while he lay there listlessly. When he was naked, she pressed her hands to his chest and thighs. His skin was scalding to the touch. He gave a quiet moan of relief at the coolness of her fingers. Bea brought her laundry bucket from the front porch, and filled it at the well. She grabbed a handful of pink handkerchiefs from her basket and laid them down next to the bed. She wrung the handkerchiefs out, and dabbed them over his face, neck, armpits, his chest, his groin. His feet were icy cold. She took each one between her hands and rubbed them vigorously. Wasn’t that meant to bring a fever down from his head? Or was that something she’d read in a novel?
After a couple of minutes, the heat rising from his body warmed the handkerchiefs through, and they were hot between her hands. Max had fallen asleep, and his quiet snoring comforted her. She didn’t want to leave him lying naked and damp like that, so she brought through a fresh sheet from her own room and laid it over him, just to his stomach. She rubbed the gingery trail of hair under his navel, and looked around the room. What was she to do? Max had never even caught so much as a cold before.
Max lay there for almost three weeks. Bea washed him with the handkerchiefs, and left the laundry bucket in there so he might relieve himself into it. Sometimes, she climbed into the bed with him, and brushed his hair, while his clammy hand gripped her other arm appreciatively. She left a canister of water next to him, propped up on a pile of books by the bedside, so he could help himself. Whenever she went into the room she checked the canister to see how much he had drunk. She force-fed him ladlefuls of the stuff at a time, propping his head up with one forearm while the lukewarm water dribbled into his beard. He seemed to be sleeping all the time. Bea tried to keep the room neat and clean, since that was what she would have wanted in her illness. She swept the room each morning, and cut a ginger flower from the garden to stand in a glass on the green stool.
Max watched this flower from his bed. There was nothing else in the room to look at. He watched as glossy brown ants teemed out of its cells, streaming along the stem, across the floor. They marched in columns up into the bed. They crawled on his face, they crept inside his ear canals. He could feel this exquisite itching he couldn’t reach with his hands or his tongue. He rubbed his face up and down on the sheets, trying to dislodge the ants. But the ants had spread; they had multiplied into a thick sheet on the wall opposite his bed. There were so many, they made a rustling sound like a summer wind. He called out for Bea, but his throat was hoarse and she couldn’t hear him. When she came later that evening, she kept telling him there were no ants, patting the walls as if they weren’t there, plunging her arms wrist-deep into the ant thicket. He couldn’t trust her after that. He didn’t want to drink the water she left for him. There were ants in there, too – floating, dead clots on the surface. She pretended not to see them. In the night he could still hear the ants in the room, rustling and ticking like a colossal clock. They swarmed around the feet of the bed, and it listed from side to side.
Bea checked on him as often as she could, but there was so much to do. There was never-ending weeding and clipping in their garden. She had to strip switches to mend fences to protect their seedling cabbages from rats and hungry children. There was the hot, heavy work of drawing rainwater from the well. She had to fish out drowned, distended rats with the ‘rat stick’, an instrument she had invented by inexpertly hammering a nail into the end of a bamboo pole. There were hours spent collecting and chopping firewood. She had to walk miles to Aru’s store twice a week to try to buy candles, as Max, in his illness, had developed a fear of the dark. There were the normal duties of the Mission House. Children knocked on the door to have a tooth pulled, teary-eyed mothers turned up with swollen-bellied children in need of yaws injections. It was hard trying to look after Max with all those distractions.
Max was barely eating anything. She boiled tea for him, but he refused to drink it. She hacked down one of the ripening banana stalks from the garden, and tried to cajole him into eating one of the warm, soft-bellied fruits, but Max gagged so violently she gave up on that completely. She had to eat mainly bananas for three days. Bea tried to think of other ways to fortify Max’s diet.
She walked through the forest to collect fallen coconuts, and took them back to the village to husk. There, she screwed Max’s penknife through the dark eye of the shell, and drained out the water into a bowl. Then she cracked the shell around its circumference with her bushknife, until it could be prised open. Next she sat on the uneven stool, holding the coconut-scraper under her thighs, grating out all the flesh. When the scraps of flesh were scored out of the shells, she soaked the strings in rainwater until it turned cloudy. This she mixed with grated manioc, and boiled it to a sort of custard, sweetened with sugar cane. She spooned it into his mouth like a baby, while he eyed her furi
ously. She mopped the floors with a wet cloth, she scrubbed his clothes and sheets every day, and hung them to dry outside. She boiled the handkerchiefs she used on him, afraid of contamination.
Bea asked Aru to send for a doctor. And three days later, a hunched middle-aged man knocked on the Mission House door in the early hours of the morning. Dressed in a red-and-white striped soccer shirt over his nambas, with ‘Oldham Athletic’ embroidered into the shirt collar, the sorcerer introduced himself as Varu Garae. He brought from his basket a tiny white bag filled with dried seeds. He nestled a seed in the groove above Max’s top lip, stretched out his arms, cracked his knuckles, and pushed his thumbs into the base of Max’s stomach. Bea winced involuntarily as Max groaned and swiped at his arms.
Through Aru’s translations, Varu instructed Bea to make Max drink a cupful of water with bark in it to help his fever. Bea didn’t much trust leaf-water, and decided to send a message to I. A. M. Jonson. She had no idea what else to do. Jonson was no doctor, but he was a man, a man who spoke English and wouldn’t expect her to fix Max with leaves. Sending a message to Jonson amounted to little more than waiting around until someone wanted to walk to the North, and asking them to take a message. And praying.
Bea worried Max’s mind was turning. He almost wept when she tried to take the hurricane lamp out of the room with her each night. He croaked constantly about insects stirring in the room. At first, she tried to reassure him there weren’t any, but he became so frantic that she appeased him. She brought the broom into the room, swept in every corner and declared victory over all those pesky ants.
She thought he might need something to occupy his mind – anything else but ants. She tried reading to him from the books on his shelf in the study, but they were mostly Bible commentaries or biographies, and she found them so inexpressibly boring she couldn’t bear to read more than a few pages out loud. She perched on the green stool in the corner, and tried to read to Max from the Bible, but she was conscious that as loopy as he was, he might notice she said all the names wrong. Nothing seemed to relax him – he would just scratch and sweat and stream. She thought about reading out ‘Adam and Eve’, but Genesis seemed to be long names and endless begetting. After the first three days, she gave up on the Bible, and asked Santra to come and tell him stories. Each night, Bea lit a candle for him, and placed it carefully in a saucer of water out of his reach.
Max lay awake most nights. It wasn’t so hot then, it was easier on his eyes. He had to stay vigilant anyhow, or the ants would crawl through his eyelashes and into the corners of his mouth. He lay awake listening to the screaming from the church as it continued, long, long into the night. The screams knocked around his brain. He would hear the sounds retained in perfect pitch, even hours after they had stopped. Song refrains drilled into his skull and were trapped in there, like a small bird in a hat. He sang ‘Jesus, Mi Lavem Yu Tumas’, over and over in his head until he felt nauseous. He craved peppermint, he ached for it. Just a taste of peppermint, he thought, and all the sickness would be over.
One night, he heard a tapping at the window frame. They were deliberate taps, a fingernail against wood. Max struggled up on to his elbows and squinted at the window. Perhaps it was one of the girls from the church, playing a cruel game. The tapping grew louder. Someone was pushing against the frame with the palms of their hands. Someone was trying to break into the room. The wooden frame fell through into the room with a clatter. The open window let in a humid breeze. But there was also a dark shape moving outside. Somebody was standing there. All the hairs on Max’s scalp began to twist in their pores. Two white hands and a shoulder gripped the splintered frame. And the shape edged through the window, and into his bedroom. Max knew instantly who it was.
It was Marietta.
Marietta struggled halfway through the window, her hands placed flat on the ground. She was looking down in front of her, breathing unevenly. She was moving slowly, inelegantly, her legs hooked over the frame of the window as she lowered herself on to her forearms and knees. She was still fat, after all. It was dark, too dark to see her properly. But that grey lock of hair was all in front of her face. She took another breath, and looked up, suddenly, towards the bed.
The eye he could see was milky white all the way through, like that of an old man. Max couldn’t move. He could smell her, warm and nasty, a dog after the rain. Her face was turned towards him now. She looked at him curiously, the way a child might look at a stranger. On her hands and knees, she began to crawl towards Max’s bed. Max tried to call out against her, a prayer, an exhortation. All that came out was a high whine like a calf. She crawled closer, until her face was almost level with the bed. The dog smell moved his stomach. She lingered for a moment, then perched up into a squat on her haunches. Max heard the cracking in her knee sockets.
He couldn’t move. The room was so small. His legs were shaking under the sheet, his heart felt like it was climbing. Marietta took a few heavy breaths, and pressed her face against the folds of the mosquito net at the end of the bed. A cross-hatch pattern fell on her skin from his only candle. The shaking spread to his arms; he could hardly keep up on his elbows. And then, all in one movement, she turned and scuttled back across the room. For a moment, Max thought she was leaving, but she clambered unsteadily up on to her old green stool. She leant her head back against the wall, and with those cloudy eyes, she watched him.
When the sun rose, Max saw Marietta was still there, sitting on the stool. She had been there, watching him, all night. But then he realized it wasn’t Marietta. Santra was there instead, for storyan. She was shuffling pandan leaves together, braiding a basket. She nodded to him expressionlessly.
‘In the old days, people never died. When your outer skin grew old, and heavy with wrinkles, you could take it off, and leave it somewhere, dropping your age behind you. One day, an old woman took her children to wash clothes in the river. She left her old skin upstream and walked down to take the children home. But her daughter didn’t recognize her. She cried and wailed. “Don’t worry,” said the mother, “it’s me – your mother. I’ve only removed my old skin.” But the daughter was afraid, she was suspicious of her newly young mother, and refused to leave the river with her, calling for her real mother to come and chase away this stranger. Her mother pleaded with her. For if she put her old skin back on, she wouldn’t be able to take it off again. She would stay old, and die. The child wailed and cried until the mother had no choice. She sighed, and went back upstream, heaving her lined old skin back on to her body again. And from then on, people could not remove their skins, but stayed old and died.’
Max dreamed he was walking uphill in the bush, going up to Central. It was not long after the rain, and the slopes were tacky with orange mud. It was hard walking; he had a cane with him to help push off the sides of the hill. It was a warm, bright day, with high white clouds brushed up on to the blue. He saw himself, walking along beside him. This seemed normal at first. But then he realized, it couldn’t be himself, for he was already himself. He looked at his other body, and saw it was only a mask, a dead skin. It was crawling with a black, seeping network of veins. He saw the thing wearing his skin had failed to cover its feet. They were grey and cracked, with long toes that tapered into points. Max remembered he had taken his skin off and left it by the stream behind him. Now a demon was wearing his face. The demon had put his skin on all lopsided. Its pink tongue left a trail of white spittle on the corners of its mouth.
Max woke with a yelp. He looked for Santra, but she was gone. Aru was there instead. He had pulled the stool up by his bedside. His Bible was open on his lap. Aru put a finger inside his Bible, and put a hand on Max’s forehead. His palm smelt clean and a bit sickly, like that pink soap. Max felt a pawing inside his stomach. He knew suddenly Aru would know what to do about Marietta creeping around in the corners of his bedroom. Aru would understand. His own wife was some dark thing now in the forest as well. Max tried to explain that Marietta was in the bush, or somewhere close
, and also in the house, by his bed. But his tongue was thick, he couldn’t get the words out. He felt his eyes burning with frustration. A cold slimy queasiness licked up and down inside his chest.
Aru said nothing. He looked carefully at Max in silence. He pulled his finger from the pages, closed his Bible, and he left.
Max fell asleep again, exhausted, alone. No one could help him. He wished he could burn the room to pieces – leave her nothing to creep through. But Aru came back sometime later – a day? He didn’t know, it was dark again, maybe it was the same day. Aru dropped his island basket by the left wall, and from it brought a small sack of crystal salt. Max wept with relief. He didn’t even care that Aru would see him. Aru understood. He had understood him, after all. Max wept thin tears as Aru whispered soft words, and traced a circle of salt around his bed.
Marietta couldn’t come into his room now. But she was still lurking around. She came up to the house from the forest at night. She sat against the wall of his room outside the house, looking up towards the hills. He could smell her hot, wet dog smell from the bed. It made him gag small pitches of liquid on to the sheets. Sometimes she sang. Sometimes it wasn’t her singing but it was the girls at the bottom of the hill, in the church. In the daytimes, Aru was there. Aru knew about Marietta. He cast her out of the house, he cast her out of the village. He prayed over Max’s body. He pressed his Bible down to his forehead, and Max felt relieved, utterly relieved that he was taking charge.
Aru knew about the demons in the forest.
Aru knew about them creeping and crawling into houses, and also into souls.
Max understood now. He understood that one had crept into his body in the night. It had come creeping in from the dark and crawled inside his mouth. He hadn’t killed Marietta because he was evil. Aru told him so – he wasn’t evil. He wasn’t evil, but something evil had taken a hold of him.