The Black Isle

by Sandi Tan

  “Robin, you idiot!” I cried, but Li clutched my arm.

  The images rearranged themselves before my eyes: The girl wasn’t helping Robin. She was gouging into his belly with long, sharp nails. Blood sprayed everywhere. On the carpet, on the settee—all over her.

  She turned toward us and screeched, blood dripping from her gums. Her teeth weren’t teeth but little black fangs. Before we could move, she flew at us.

  “Run!” Li pushed me out of the way and was pinned to the ground by the she-demon. Before my eyes, her flesh was mutating into gray, suppurating meat.

  “Leave him alone!” I screamed in Malay.

  She pressed her mouth onto Li’s neck in an obscene parody of passion. He shrieked—in terror, I hoped, not pain. Grabbing the amok fork from beside Robin, I rushed to save my brother.

  But as I ran toward her, the world slowed down, and the air thickened into a kind of glue. A second heartbeat began pounding in my chest, a shadow heartbeat that soon outpaced my own. Following this new, quickened pulse, the figures thrashing before me seemed to be performing a slow-motion ballet.

  Li seized my ankle, and the second heartbeat ceased. “Help me!”

  My senses rushed back.

  Raising the fork high over my head, I plunged its tines into the pontianak’s back. It felt like tilling hard-packed earth.

  The creature unleashed a piercing scream that bore the fury of two women—one human, the other monstrous. She twisted her head to stare at me, her engorged eyes bulging as black as leeches. When our eyes locked, my second heartbeat resumed.

  I killed my father, her dark pupils told me. I know you understand.

  It was Mina, the dead Milkmaid.

  I drank the blood you left me in the forest.

  My blood?

  Before I could speak, the fork whipped across my ribs, knocking me to the floor. The pontianak was coming for me now. I raised my arms to shield my face.

  “Mina!” I begged.

  She swiped at me with nails so sharp I felt only the slightest sting. I looked down. Five lines darkened along my forearms and the flesh around them split open like pods, disgorging blood.

  The pontianak turned back to Li, twirling the heavy fork in her hands. Li closed his eyes, his lips shuddering in prayer.

  But instead of impaling him, the creature used the fork as it was meant to be: She clamped his neck down. Then she circled him, making birdlike caws.

  I had to do something. There had to be a parang somewhere outside the house, maybe in the tangle of shovels by the abandoned brick stove. I sprinted to the back door, unbolted it, and stepped outside.

  The rain had stopped. The night possessed the wise, unhurried calm of the innermost rainforest, rich with the aroma of lilies, orchids, and frangipani. Swish, swoosh. Swish, swoosh. The sounds of leaves rustling in the breeze, perhaps the most ancient lullaby known to man. The trees beyond the estate swayed, their shimmering fronds dappled by the silver moonlight. All of the jungle beckoned, dark and deep, promising rest, comfort, everlasting peace. I craved escape into its velvet embrace.

  “Ling…” Li’s cry was watery, abstract, part of this forest dream.

  My feet pulled me toward the jungle. After a few steps, something huge and black blocked my way, as if someone had cut a hole in the scenery. I could not see past this bullying square of pure absence. Quickly, the form grew depth—or rather, my eyes gave it meaning: It was the black hut. Somebody had moved it here. But why?

  Its door was ajar, the big rusty padlock gone.

  I kicked the door open. In the darkness was a lone parang, its blade as long as my arm. It stood poised on its tip, suspended in thin air. I groped around under and over it, even along its sides—there was nothing holding it in place. As I drew my fingers away, it glinted at me and didn’t stop until I brought my hand back.

  The instant I grabbed its handle, I heard my brother cry, “Ling!” as clearly as if he’d been standing next to me.

  Li needed me—now.

  Running back into the house, I saw that the pontianak had abandoned him for Robin. She hunched over him, a mad pianist about to launch into the blackest of chords, and threw her claws into his chest. Robin tried to scream but his cries thickened into gargles—blood had already filled his larynx. Bright red bubbles foamed at his mouth.

  I came from behind the monster, pulled my arm back, but didn’t have to swing—the parang had a momentum all its own. It was drawn, as if magnetically, to her neck.

  The demon’s head plummeted off her shoulders with one inelegant droop and rolled across the floor until it struck the leg of a chair. Its dead eyes stared back at me, and in that instant I experienced a weird foretaste of my own death. Emptiness engulfed me and drew me to the ground just as my knees buckled.

  When I finally caught my breath, I looked over to Li. He nodded to let me know he was all right.

  The pontianak’s lifeless torso remained exactly where I’d destroyed her, held upright by the fingers still buried in Robin’s gut. I pictured his blood spraying like a fountain if they were removed from him; I didn’t move them.

  “Save me,” he pleaded in a whispery gurgle. But it was too late. Even his vacant eyes knew it.

  I picked myself off the ground and went to fetch his bottle of gin.

  “Help will be here soon,” I assured him, putting on a brave, if dishonest, face. I poured the gin down his throat and watched it seep out of his wounds.

  Li propped himself up on one elbow. His shirt was smeared with blood, and his neck and shoulders were covered in cuts. Seeing him in pain, I could no longer hold back my tears.

  “She spat out my blood.” He pointed to the crimson spatter on the wall and squeezed my arm to show he still had the strength. He forced out a smile. “She didn’t want my bad blood.”

  “The workers were right, you know,” I told him. “That was Mina.”

  Li looked startled. “Couldn’t be.”

  “Why not?”

  “Mina was short and dark.” His voice tightened. “This one looked much more like…you.”

  The police finally arrived, with Father in tow. The workers’ exodus had been sighted on the road into Ulu Pandan, and the station dispatched its only car to investigate.

  The two uniformed men sat Father down. I could smell the toddy on him from the other end of the room. His eyes took in none of the blood and injuries before him. He remained locked in a narcissistic dream where tragedy favored him and him alone.

  “What will I do?” he mumbled. “What will I do?”

  I wanted to slap him, and then slap him some more.

  The young Chinese officer accidentally kicked the pontianak’s head across the floor and ran from the house screaming like a woman. His partner, a steadfast, bronze Gurkha—one of the Nepalese tribesmen the British had recruited in scores—shook his head and clucked, as if he dealt with decapitated demons all the time.

  “I don’t know how you did it, but you did a fine job,” he told me, gesturing to the severed neck. He looked at my bleeding cuts. “And you don’t seem to mind the pain.” He was wrong—of course I did mind. But both Li and Robin were suffering far more.

  Amazingly, Robin was still holding on. His cheek twitched and he muttered something to the Gurkha.

  “Beg your pardon?” The Gurkha leaned in closer to listen. He pursed his lips and shot me a bemused smile. “He is telling me that you are a witch.”

  A witch? After I saved his life!

  The Gurkha’s smile grew conspiratorial, assuring me that he knew better. “Englishmen are all the same up-country. Their blood just cannot take it. They go mad, cause trouble, and get themselves killed.”

  He pointed at the weird Pietà of Robin and the she-demon. “We can fit him inside the car, but first I’ll need to chop off her arms.”

  I searched for the parang—it was nowhere in the room. Out the back door, the black hut was gone. Gone, too, was the tranquillity and the cool, deep-jungle air. No orchid scent, no frangipani.
The nightscape had reverted to its buzzing, irritated state.

  Could I have dreamt the whole interlude?

  With a handkerchief fastened over his nose, the Gurkha had already begun carving into the pontianak’s arms with his kukri knife, the dagger of Gurkha warriors.

  “Do you do this often?” I asked when he finally removed the pontianak’s torso from the glistening stumps of her rotting forearms.

  “Here in the countryside, we do all kinds of things. This is not even the worst.”

  I believed him.

  “Don’t say we never warn you,” he said. “There are spirits here much older and more powerful than us people.”

  By the time he finished dismembering Mina, Robin Melmoth had joined the world of the spirits. But he looked calm, as if he were merely asleep. I half expected him to sit up at any moment and demand another sip of gin.

  The Gurkha said a quick Hindu prayer and carried the two bodies—and the severed head—out to the Englishman’s Jeep. We heard him tell his Chinese partner he would take the pontianak to the jungle and burn her, then deliver Robin to the Ulu Pandan morgue. But he announced his plan so theatrically that I wondered if Robin’s body would ever see the morgue. The local police obviously had idiosyncratic methods.

  The other officer drove us to the doctor, Li and I squashed in the back of the two-door Model B squad car, jerking back and forth with the bumpiness of the road.

  “You were in a trance,” Li whispered the next morning. Now that he felt better, his voice again assumed that pious tone. “What was going through your mind?”

  “I wasn’t thinking,” I said. “There was no time. I just took the parang and—”

  “What parang?”

  “The parang I found outside.”

  He stared at me. “I was there. I saw you. There was no parang.” The terror in his eyes returned. “You ripped off her head with your bare hands.”

  Of course, we were finished in the jungle.

  The plantation was lost, even though some of our tappers had begun trickling back onto the estate, hungry for work. For a day or so, I felt the sweet reprieve of an impossible weight lifted off my shoulders. Absolution, almost. Then two mustached lawyers working for the Melmoth family materialized, mosquito-bitten and with complicated papers demanding payment for the Blood Hill fire, the runaway workers, and, of course, Robin’s death, whether or not we had been directly responsible. Luckily, the Ulu Pandan coroner determined we were faultless: Robin Melmoth, it was officially ruled, had been mauled by a wild tiger. Still the lawyers persisted, and Father was fined for not keeping those beasts off the estate.

  Our savings vanished in a flash.

  Over the following days, we sobered up in our different ways. Father vowed he would no longer go into Ulu Pandan. Li avoided all contact with the Milkmaids. But I still had my own questions.

  However the pontianak’s head came off—Li had been delirious; his testimony was unreliable—I couldn’t forget how her alien heartbeat had devoured mine, tying me to her, or was it the other way around? Who had colonized whom? One thing was certain: The jungle dead were not like any dead I’d known. They did not heed the same laws.

  And though I refused to concede it at the time, Li was right: Anim did resemble me, not Mina. She had my eyes, my lips, my overlong arms, my knobby knees. What she told me was probably true. The pontianak had drunk my blood. The blood of my womb.

  The thought made me shudder. I sucked down the rest of Robin’s gin and tried to forget the whole episode. Without letting anyone know, not even Li, I quietly packed my bags. I knew I would never find peace in the jungle aside from the peace of death.

  In bright noon light, I cycled through the plantation one final time. Blood Hill was charred bald, really the way it should have been kept all along. The corpse of Mina’s father had been removed from the tembusu and cremated by the workers who had returned. The gargantuan tree itself was cut down and replaced by a small shrine—a simple wood crate smoldering with incense. The Melmoth estate was in shambles. Our family had certainly left its mark.

  The black hut revealed no trace of itself, neither on the grassy knoll where I’d seen Li and his Milkmaid, nor behind our house.

  At the hives, I bade farewell to my workers with cordial handshakes that startled most of them. Rani fled as soon as she saw me coming. It was a pity, as I’d intended to apologize. Following a quick shower, I grabbed my two canvas sacks and hitched a ride with the Gurkha policeman to Ulu Pandan, where I could find a bus that would take me back to the city.

  Li followed a few days later. And then, unfortunately, Father.

  If there’s one truth about life I’ve learned in all these years of running, it’s that there is no such thing as a clean escape.

  DO I FEEL BETTER NOW—or worse? Thirty, forty years younger—or a good deal older? My mood shifts from one memory to the next, like a sick pendulum.

  This bloodletting is double-edged—toxins exit, but so does vigor. My throat’s dry. My muscles ache as if I’d run miles through jungle.

  As I label my tapes, the telephone rings. I ignore it.

  Chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, chapter 4, chapter 5, chapter 6—the early years, the easy years. Juvenilia. Glad I’d stocked up on fresh tapes and batteries. I’ve always been ready for emergencies; I have the war to thank for that.

  At long last, my answering machine intercepts the call.

  “Ling,” she begins, saying my childhood name as if she actually knows me. “I can tell you’re there…Please pick up the phone.”

  “You missed a damned good beheading,” I say to the room.

  “I’m going to be a bit late. I’m being kept by…You remember our agreement? I had to make some final arrangements to fulfill my end of the bargain.”

  Our agreement. Of course, I haven’t forgotten. Our agreement fires my every thought, my every memory.

  “I’ll make the wait worth your while, I promise. I won’t disappoint you. So in the meantime”—she pauses—“percolate.”

  I pick up the phone. “Are you here to torment me or to save me? The dam has already broken. I’ve already begun. I can’t stop now.”

  I tear the phone jack from the wall and walk straight to my window. I draw open the curtains, lift up the sash, and stare out.

  “Who’s there?” I call. It’s only the night. My friend, the night.

  I am telling this story to remind myself how brave I was in my youth. I took on a pontianak—and won. Why can’t I be a brave girl once more?

  I beat my fist against my chest. Thump, thump.

  My heart replies, Thump, thump.

  7

  Wonder World

  THE CITY HAD RESHAPED ITSELF between 1934 and 1937. It was taller, much taller, like a bean sprout of a boy who’d had a growth spurt over the holidays and returned in the new term a giant. I came back gaping skyward.

  Even Bullock Cart Water hadn’t been exempt from change. A fire had gutted our old row house soon after we left, snuffing out fifty in their sleep, just like that. It was torn down, leaving a gaping tooth on the block. Though all evidence pointed to arson, city officials refused to rule it as such, fearing copycats. A one-legged ghost stood at the site recounting the tragedy in a droning voice. I tried to ignore him but found I could not, so moved was I by his sense of duty and outrage. I’d like to think I’d do the same if I, too, had been so heartlessly killed.

  Oh, to be back again in the city, where the dead spoke of their troubles rather than lash out in blood violence!

  Our building wasn’t the only casualty of passing time. The pavement barber was gone, as were the sadhu and the karang guni man. I never liked them much before, but now I missed them all.

  Spring Street, the main thoroughfare, was now lined with apartment buildings eight or nine stories high. The neighborhood certainly needed them. It was swarming with new arrivals. Japan’s invasion of China had pushed thousands onto our shores, and these lost souls aligned themselves according to whether th
ey favored noodles (Northerners) or rice (Southerners). All of them chose Chinatown. I found myself looking for Mother and the twins in their midst, though I knew she’d be too proud to run to the city where Father lived. I kept a hopeful eye out anyway—if only for the twins. My eleven-year-old babies.

  The refugees carried bad habits from the old country: prostitution, gambling, opium. Yet as before, the city did nothing when gangs came out with their knives; if no one scrubbed the blood off the pavement, it sat there blackening for weeks. In contrast, whenever a peaceful group of Chinese gathered to protest a shady Japanese business, the governor clamped down immediately, ordering curfews. Double standards in the colonial city we were accustomed to, but this protectiveness toward the Japanese was something new. Father surmised it was about face—and money. The Japanese were investing in shops, hotels, and restaurants and were so good at scratching British egos by mimicking them in dress, manner, and taste.

  We lived on the top floor—the eighth—in one of the new apartment blocks on Spring Street. Though the rent was cheap, the upper floors remained largely empty. The night watchman told Father that most Chinese refused to live on the high floors because the local “singsong girls,” or prostitutes, often used them as springboards for their closing arias, as the watchman put it, diving through the air to their crimson doom below. The properties, Father told us with a small shiver, were considered “very dirty.”

  “The eighth floor is popular for suicides because eight in Chinese, you recall, is a homonym for prosperity,” he explained to Li and me. “Whether this leads them to fortune in the afterlife or not, we’ll never know. What I can tell you is this: The Taoists believe that suicides make the most troublesome ghosts.” I cringed to hear him use the word. “All right, I didn’t always have time for this type of thing. But after the plantation, anything’s possible. So, to be on the safe side, I urge you to behave yourselves. Don’t do anything that might provoke them. And, here, keep these with you as an added precaution.”