The Minorities

by Suffian Hakim

  I stopped struggling against the pontianak. “Shanti, Cantona, Tights!” I shouted instead. “Run!”

  Chapter Fifteen: Bridle Cake

  “Will you marry me?” I asked the pontianak, now in her human form.

  “Yes! Yes! Oh, you’re a delight, for a human being,” said the pontianak. “I am going to enjoy eating you!”

  After pulling me away from my friends, the pontianak had taken me to an abandoned two-storey building. With floors, walls and ceilings grey and unpainted, it looked like a building that had been built but never occupied. In a large, dusty room on the second floor, the pontianak began asking me to perform a series of rather peculiar acts, such as pretending to be a dog or going down on my knees and asking her to marry me, on the threat of death. This pontianak had lost it, I was very sure.

  In her human form, she was pretty in a rather androgynous manner. She was square-jawed, with short, cropped hair and a prominent nose. Her skin was a very light brown. She was thin, looking more like a boy than a creature of the night.

  She asked me to lick her claws and show her my naked buttocks—all things I did in the name of staying alive.

  “What’s your name, human?” she asked me when she tired of asking me to perform novelty acts.

  I told her.

  “I’m Harriet Hubris-Tinkledoop.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said, bowing slightly. She had not tied me nor incapacitated me in any way. If I wanted to, I could jump out one of the windows, or make a break for the stairs. In both scenarios, I was pretty sure Harriet Hubris-Tinkledoop would be much, much faster than I could be. I had the feeling I was the prey in a very twisted cat-and-mouse game.

  “And a gentleman! My human would love to meet you.” In a ghastly, obnoxious voice, she screamed, “Gretchen!”

  A tall, chiselled man came scuttling from the adjacent room, dressed in dirty dress shoes and pants. His upper torso was naked, save for a bright pink bow around his neck. He was an impressive specimen of a man, despite a couple of front teeth missing, slightly unkempt hair and patches of dirt on his skin. He smelled the way he looked, as though a hundred nights’ worth of sweat got dry in the span of a day. “Yes, ma’am?” He pronounced it as “mum”.

  “Gretchen?” I asked.

  “Yes, Gretchen,” repeated Harriet Hubris-Tinkledoop. “He’s my bitch.”

  “Is that his actual name?”

  “Of course not. But he looks like a Gretchen doesn’t he? Like a big ol’ bitch,” she said. “Gretchen, say hello to my next meal.”

  “Hello,” he said in a small, meek voice.

  “Hello,” I returned. “So what’s your actual name?”

  Gretchen’s response was deeply unsettling; he turned to me, his face impassive and blank, and smiled emptily.

  “Do you think he’s a delight, Gretchen?”

  “Yes, I do, ma’am.”

  Harriet Hubris-Tinkledoop gave Gretchen a backhanded slap across the face, sending the human sprawling across the room. “What did I say about having opinions, Gretchen?”

  The muscular man quickly got to his feet and assumed a submissive figure next to the pontianak that haunted him. “That it suggests I have a brain when I have none,” said Gretchen robotically. “I’ll never have one again, ma’am.”

  “Good. But you’re right, Gretchen. This one is a delight. Durshirah said you would be as well,” she said, approaching me. She caressed me with a single elongated claw. “Our Head has spoken of you, you know? The human who brainwashed Diyanah.”

  “But I’ve never even met him,” I said. “I’ve heard so much about Durshirah and I’d really like to know what all the fuss was about.”

  “You probably won’t,” the pontianak said languidly. “You’ll probably be dead.”

  Before she could take action towards increasing that probability, a knock came from downstairs. Harriet Hubris-Tinkledoop cocked her head, and Gretchen went scurrying down. When he came back up, Diyanah, in human form, was following behind.

  Upon seeing me, she rushed over, and we embraced.

  “Oh, wow, you really are brainwashed,” said Harriet Hubris-Tinkledoop.

  We ignored her. “You okay?” she asked, breaking the hug.

  “I am. Where are the rest?”

  A look of concern accentuated her words. “I don’t know. After Gyava and the wendigo ran, they were already gone and I came looking for you.” There was, at least, an undercurrent of hope in her being here; it meant that Tights was alive and not too far away as well.

  “We need to go find them.” It was a declaration. It was a tone I did not want to use on Diyanah, but with every passing second, my mind churned forth violent end after violent end for my friends. “Before Durshirah does.”

  “Oh, you’re not going anywhere. I don’t know if that was implied.” Harriet Hubris-Tinkledoop immediately stuck out a hand to Diyanah, who shook it hesitantly. “By the way, hello, I don’t think we’ve met, but I’ve heard quite a lot about you. I’m Harriet Hubris-Tinkledoop. Haven’t attended many COME gatherings. It’s my second month as a pontianak.”

  For some reason, this seemed to concern Diyanah. “And you’ve already lost so much of your humanity?”

  “Lost so much of my humanity? What are you talking about? Sister, I’ve got terrabytes of humanity up in here.”

  Diyanah forced a smile. “Have you been eating humans?”

  “Oh, yes, lots of them. I ate this one’s children for my first meal,” she said, casually gesturing at Gretchen. “Don’t they taste lovely?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Diyanah replied softly.

  “Sometimes, I do not care for being a pontianak,” Harriet Hubris-Tinkledoop continued, her attention solely on Diyanah. “All this waiting around in trees for unsuspecting humans to devour is not a good look on me.” She grabbed Gretchen by the cheek and shook her human’s head back and forth. “And oh, my word, don’t get me started on haunting these sad sacks of meat. Why can’t our covenant require us to haunt an H&M?”

  Diyanah, bless her soul, nodded sombrely. “Eye-kay-arr!” she snarled back.

  Harriet Hubris-Tinkledoop pointed at me, and I saw that her hands were grotesque claws—gnarled and veiny, like a grapnel came to life and died again. “Thank you for coming to visit, Diyanah, but I’m going to eat the human now.”

  “No!” Diyanah pushed me behind her, and she stood defiantly against her pontianak counterpart.

  “Sister, why are you helping this human?” Harriet Hubris-Tinkledoop drawled.

  “He helps me.”

  Harriet Hubris-Tinkledoop raised a hand slowly and pointed at me. “He claims to help you. I know these humans. They see us as vermin.”

  “I see you as vermin, treating Gretchen like that,” I said from behind Diyanah. Upon hearing that, Gretchen walked up to me, zombielike, and slapped me in the face. Diyanah simply watched in shock.

  “You’re bridling him?” she asked.

  “Why, very observant of you, sister,” said Harriet Hubris-Tinkledoop.

  “What’s bridling? Are you possessing him?”

  “No, sweet human,” Harriet Hubris-Tinkledoop replied. “Possession is when my spirit takes over a mortal’s body. What I’m doing is control, the exertion of power of one being over another. Our people,” she said, wagging a finger between herself and Diyanah, “call it bridling.”

  I wondered, with a slight feeling of relief, why I had never been bridled before. Or—had I already been bridled before, but never knew?

  My thoughts must have been plastered all over my face, because Diyanah said assuringly, “We can only bridle those that we haunt.” She must have also picked up on the change in my expression, because she added, “And I have never bridled Tights.”

  “Oh, but you should,” said Harriet Hubris-Tinkledoop, in a sage voice. “It’s a wonderful feeling, having someone under your complete control.”

  “To you, perhaps. We’ll be taking our leave now,” she said, taking my hand and makin
g for the exit. But Gretchen was already there, blocking the way.

  Harriet Hubris-Tinkledoop stood next to her human and held a hand out to Diyanah. “Join us, sister. Your place is with us, not with them.”

  “My place is not with you,” Diyanah said firmly. Gently, she pushed away her fellow pontianak’s hand. “Nor is it with Durshirah. It’s with him.”

  Even as I faced this crazed supernatural threat, my heart sang its tone-deaf song of joy—a song that abruptly ended when Diyanah added, “And with his friends.”

  “We’re stronger than them and you know it.”

  Diyanah was stepping forward confidently now, and spoke in an imploring voice, perhaps seeing an opportunity to save her brethren from the influence of Durshirah. “But at what price? How many lives will Durshirah and his followers take to get what he wants?”

  “Diyanah, don’t get so emotional! They’re just bags of meat.”

  “You’ve forgotten your humanity, sister,” Diyanah growled.

  Harriet Hubris-Tinkledoop was slowly changing into her pontianak form, an act mirrored by Diyanah as well. “I’m not exactly human anymore now, am I?”

  Harriet Hubris-Tinkledoop’s claws caught Diyanah in the shoulder, causing the latter to fall onto her knees. But she quickly got up, and began clawing back at Harriet Hubris-Tinkledoop.

  As inhuman snarls emanated behind me, I dashed for the adjacent room. This room was smaller, with broken pipes hanging from the ceiling. In a different universe, it might have served as a bathroom. My backpack was propped against a wall in the far corner of the room, but before I could reach it, a muscular leg swept at mine from behind. I only barely managed to break my fall with my hands.

  I turned and got up quickly. Gretchen, too, was getting up from his expertly executed leg sweep. He glared at me with murder in his eyes.

  “Gretchen, snap out of this,” I pleaded. “You’re being controlled by a very evil entity.” He looked like a guy I could hang out with, with his large, expressive eyes. But when he stepped towards me, making angry, animal noises, I found myself backing away in trepidation.

  “Look, man!” I said loudly, hoping it was enough to mask my growing fear. “I know the real you is in there somewhere. I need you to fight whatever spell that bitch has over you.”

  Gretchen was within punching distance now, and he threw one that connected emphatically with the left side of my jaw. I reeled backwards. A surprisingly intelligent fighter, Gretchen did not give me time to recover, kicking me in the stomach for good measure. I fell backwards, onto my bag. Gretchen was attacking again, and this time he was lifting an Oxford-shoe-covered foot. He then brought it down hard, onto my chest. A blunt ache erupted where his foot met my right collar bone.

  He was preparing to strike with his leg again, and I quickly raised my bag to absorb the blow. It did so well enough for me to get up and tackle him—he screamed rabidly as he fell to the floor, and I ran down the stairs, towards the exit.

  The building was on a barren clearing, in the middle of a circle of sand roughly the size of a football stadium. There was evidence of a construction project abandoned halfway—a rusty cement mixer, unopened bags of cement and construction tools were strewn haphazardly across the mini-dustbowl.

  There were the unfortunately familiar snarls of pontianaks from inside the house, which were immediately punctuated by the sound of crashing cement. I looked up to see Diyanah flying and subsequently skidding onto the ground near me in a cloud of rubble, having been flung through the walls by Harriet Hubris-Tinkledoop. I rushed to her side and helped her up to her feet. It was my first time consciously touching Diyanah while she was in pontianak form.

  The building’s main door opened, and out stepped the wild and frenzied Gretchen.

  I quickly dug into my bag, pushing past clothes and bottles of water and the copy of Cosmos, hoping to catch the feel of something small and metallic.

  A singular almond fell out of the bag, but I couldn’t bother to pick it up. Our two foes were circling us now—Harriet Hubris-Tinkledoop making an arc towards Diyanah, and Gretchen doing the same in the other direction, towards me.

  My hands eventually grabbed what I was looking for—my Swiss Army knife. I flicked out the blade and threw my bag behind me.

  With a battle cry that was fearsome, maniacal and utterly insane all at once, Gretchen sprinted towards me. I brandished the knife, but that did not seem to perturb him at all. “Gretchen, don’t make me do it!” I called, but on he ran, raving wildly and unintelligibly.

  I held up my knife, hoping it would deter him, but he ran straight into me, causing me to tumble backwards against the force of his madness. It winded me, but I quickly recovered. Behind me, Harriet Hubris-Tinkledoop gave an awful, ear-splitting howl of anguish. There was blood in my hands and on my shirt. Gretchen’s face was mangled with shock and dismay, and as I pushed him off me, I saw my Swiss Army knife embedded into his sculpted abdomen, its smooth red metallic handle coated in the thicker red of his blood.

  It was a horrendous feeling, to know that I might have fatally wounded this innocent young man, whose madness was merely a by-product of a pontianak controlling his mind. Guilt, black and dreadful, stabbed my soul.

  But Gretchen was still growling. He got up and, his eyes glazed over, pulled the knife out of his abdomen. Blood spurted and flowed like the Styx from the now gaping wound. He waved it menacingly at me. I stood up and steeled myself for his relentless attacks. Gretchen swung once, and I easily jumped back. He swung again, weakly, and I sidestepped it easily. Gretchen had spilled a curved trail of bright red on the sand like some kind of macabre calligraphy. He tried one final swing, before collapsing to the ground. I held up his head. Blood was oozing out his mouth now, and he gargled the stuff as he spoke.

  “I’m free again, if only just,” Gretchen said in a voice that suggested a much gentler soul.

  In my arms, with his blood staining my clothes and my hands, the man who had lost his freedom and identity to Harriet Hubris-Tinkledoop breathed his last. Insanity begot insanity, dust to dust.

  It was then that I noticed the singular almond next to his head—the very same one that had escaped my bag. Something compelled me to pick it up. I then ran to my bag, dropped the almond into it, and sprinted towards the pontianaks.

  Harriet Hubris-Tinkledoop and Diyanah had stopped fighting, the former still howling and writhing. The terrible noise she made reverberated into the sand, into the trees. I walked up to Diyanah, who simply stood there, watching, and asked what was wrong with the other pontianak.

  “Her covenant’s reconstituting. She has to haunt this place now, the place where her familiar was killed.”

  I looked at Gretchen’s corpse, and I suddenly wished I had made a greater effort to know his name. “We need to bury him.”

  “No!” Harriet Hubris-Tinkledoop turned sharply to us, a sickening twist of her body. “Leave him!” she growled. She walked—the way she did, it was like she was dragging her twisted upper torso by her legs—to Gretchen’s lifeless body. Harriet Hubris-Tinkledoop knelt and cried, running her fingers through her deceased familiar’s wild hair.

  “Let’s go,” Diyanah said softly. We strode away from the building, now a cold, grey monument to death and destruction. When we reached the place, where sand met grass, we stopped. The jungle stood before us, foreboding and dark.

  “Any idea where to start?” I asked her, holding back a deluge of dark thoughts about the fates of my friends.

  “No,” she said. “Let’s start by heading back to the car?”

  I pursed my lips. I guess I was hoping for some kind of deus ex machina, but it was a start nevertheless.

  She led the way, into the jungle. We barely put a thicket between ourselves and Harriet Hubris-Tinkledoop when I crashed headlong into another human body. When I recovered from the crash and saw whom it had been, I whooped in joy and kissed the other person on the cheek.

  “Toto,” said Tights grimly, “I have a feeling we
’re not in Kansas anymore.”

  Chapter Sixteen: Anarchy Lime Pie

  “I never see where they go,” Tights was saying when we were back at the car.

  “We’ll find them,” I assured him, and possibly also myself. Turning to Diyanah, I asked, “Can you sense them anywhere? Have they been taken?”

  “Help us, Diyanah, you’re our only hope,” Tights added.

  She looked at us intently, silently. I feared for a moment that she was about to tell us that two of our best friends were lost forever. She closed her eyes.

  “What—”

  “Shh!”

  “They’re not too far away,” she finally said. She turned away from us and pointed into the distance. “But we need to hurry. I sense Gyava near them.”

  “Get in the car,” I said to Tights, but he was already ahead of me. He jumped into the passenger seat while I took the driver’s. Diyanah floated into the car behind us.

  “Head northwest,” she commanded.

  I stepped on the accelerator and we drove into the jungle. Tree branches snapped and cracked against the windshield. I couldn’t see where we were going but if Diyanah said she could sense my friends somewhere through this, then this was the way we were going to go.

  I couldn’t tell how long we had been driving before the trees revealed a solitary old sawmill. It looked long abandoned. Its glass windows were broken, and its steel façade was brown with rust.

  “There. They’re in there,” Diyanah said. “But there are…others.”

  “Gyava and his goons?”

  “Not just them. We need to be careful.”

  I brought the car to a skidding halt in the dirt. We got out, and rushed along a concrete path to the large, rusty blue sliding door. Chopped wood was piled up next to the entrance, and Tights picked up a thick, sturdy piece.