by Sandi Tan
“All right, then. We’ll speak in the car. Please, Cassandra. Just a few minutes of your time. I promise you…I will make this worth your while.”
Seven minutes later, a black Jaguar came to a halt outside my apartment building. As the tinted window lowered, revealing Violet in the backseat, I stepped out of the shadows and showed myself.
The driver, a silent Malay, waited for me to buckle up and began driving slowly toward the city. Anyone who saw us through the blackened glass might have thought they were witnessing the setup of some eerie film noir: two grim old biddies journeying into the night.
Violet’s face was puffy from hours, perhaps even days, of distress. She had regained all her old weight plus the accumulated sagging of age. But her directness was the same as ever.
“I know about you and him.” To my surprise, her voice held no rancor. “At this point, none of it matters. All that matters is that you’re the one person who can save him. He’s locked himself in his study since this morning, drunk on champagne, refusing to come out. I fear this is it. He’s given up.”
She broke into a heaving sob. I couldn’t tell what her words meant—was Kenneth threatening to quit or to kill himself? Either scenario seemed unlikely, for this was a man who had survived far worse.
“He’s never known what it’s like to fail,” she continued, “to have his judgments questioned. Now, with these crises. And with you leaving…”
“Don’t try to pin the blame on me.” I stared out the window. The tinted glass made everything look artificially dark. Was this how Kenneth saw the world?
“I’m not blaming you for anything. There’s no time for blame. We both care about him—that’s why I’ve asked you here. Something else horrible has been happening, something the press has yet to uncover. But it’s only a matter of time.” She took a deep breath. “It’s those underground tunnels, for the new trains. You know we’ve been using a lot of workers from Thailand. Good, hardworking boys from the north. Well, since last week, they’ve been dropping like flies.”
“How many?”
“About thirty so far.”
“Thirty?” The poor things, perishing in foreign earth, far from home.
“But there’s nothing wrong with our safety or engineering,” she added quickly. “The boys just collapsed and went into a kind of coma; those who couldn’t be woken up died within the hour. The three who’ve come forth—the ones who did wake—all talked about winged female demons appearing to them in their sleep. Apsara, you know, those flying things from Eastern mythology.”
I knew them well but said, “Have you ruled out gas leaks?”
“If only. Of course, that’s the first thing the contractors checked, but it’s nothing like that. No, no. It’s nothing that can be explained, not conventionally. Ken thinks it’s supernatural.” She laughed uncomfortably. “But if he says so in public, can you imagine how the world’s going to view him? Honestly, he couldn’t care less what his own wife thinks of him, but the world? That’s his greatest fear, to be taken as a fool.
“As a Catholic, I’m reluctant to believe in any of this myself, but I also know that on the Isle, the rules have always been different. There are too many things here I cannot begin to understand, things that somebody like you might know more about.”
“Me?”
“Yes, Lady Midnight.”
The car stopped at the foot of Forbidden Hill, now partially bald and the site of massive construction. Colorful banners on the pedestrian walkway announced, ANOTHER PROJECT BY THE MASS TRANSIT AUTHORITY. INCONVENIENCE NOW FOR AN ACCELERATED FUTURE! Behind it were towering plywood scaffolds.
It looked neat and civilized on the outside, but I’d seen how construction was carried out on the Isle—poor foreign workers fed on inadequate food descending into holes wearing inadequate gear. But unlike the dozens of sites around the city that chugged along twenty-four hours a day for the advent of the underground train, here no machinery was rumbling. Work had apparently come to a halt. I tried to see if there was anybody who might give me a hint about what was happening but didn’t see a soul.
“This is where the men perished,” said Violet. “All in one location. We sent the others back to their little villages, paid them enough to be quiet.”
Up at the old cemetery on the side of the Hill, part of which peered from above the pretty scaffolds, the shrubbery was gone, and the tombs had been reduced to rubble. Oh, Kenneth Kee, how cheap your promises…
“Just look at what he’s done,” I said. “Even if you don’t believe in—”
Violet cut me off. “The shortest route between Chinatown and city hall was straight through this hill. We had no choice.”
“There’s always a choice. You could have dug around it. No passenger would have noticed the difference of one minute in their journey.”
“Be that as it may,” she went on, suddenly firm, “the tunneling is complete.”
“Then it’s too late. Isn’t it?”
“Maybe not. If it’s true the spirits of the dead have been causing these disruptions, you could find out what they want. Tell us how we can stop more incidents from happening.”
I glanced at my watch: 1:15. I should have been in bed ages ago.
“Cassandra.” She clutched my hands. “I’ll give you a million dollars. Out of my own pocket. That’s all I ask of you—please. You’ll have the money tonight, I promise. Tell me what they want. Or our Ken’s lost.”
She mentioned the sum as if it were immaterial, as if I were one of those workers she had so casually paid off.
“Ahmad will take me home,” she said, throwing a nod at the inexpressive driver. “Then he’ll come back here and wait for you. Please. If not for Ken, then for our beleaguered island. It’s yours, too, you know.”
The truth was I did know.
I slipped through a crack in the plywood scaffold—one of the few advantages of being skinny as a twig. At sixty-eight, I was far from spry but could always stretch myself out if ever I had to outsmart a barrier. I was never any good at respecting boundaries.
Lying before me, glazed pale blue by the moonlight, was an enormous crater at least two stories deep—the site of the future underground station. Pylons, cinder blocks, and metal webbing peered curiously out of the mud, alongside an extended family of digging equipment, their yellow scooping arms frozen in midthrust. At the hill’s base, I spotted the entrance to a tunnel—the tunnel—its dirt ceiling and sides propped up by wood trusses in the manner of a mine shaft. Light flickered from within, the only hint of movement in this vast nocturnal still life.
I looked up the denuded hillside and jumped back in fear. I was being watched—not by dead workers but by thirty people in garb from decades and centuries past, the permanent residents of Forbidden Hill. They stood motionless, like a macabre display at a wax museum. Their eyes shone with hatred.
A breeze ruffled my hair and I felt myself go as rigid as the bulldozers in the crater. I’d never had ghosts direct such furious looks at me, their friend and advocate. If they decided to attack, I was finished. What a sad, misunderstood end it would be, too—dying, it seemed, while on patriotic service to the prime minister.
How could I have taken Violet’s bait? The ghost world was no longer my domain. I was old, out of practice, outnumbered. I was a librarian, for God’s sake. Instead of standing here, fighting the unknown on behalf of a man who was no longer my lover or even my friend, I should have been savoring one final night in my apartment, luxuriating in old memories or nursing a giant mug of Ovaltine. Not this.
I cursed Violet’s tears and my own vanity, although guilt, too, surely had a hand.
No matter—it was too late to slink away.
A dark silhouette appeared at the mouth of the tunnel. It was a small boy, not menacing like the others. He gave me a friendly wave. I knew the ghosts had chosen such an emissary to put me at ease, to disarm me.
I waved back and suddenly felt as if he and I were about to resume a conversatio
n we’d begun not long ago. On a topic I knew well.
The boy beckoned for me to follow him into the tunnel. For a second I hesitated. Then I walked to the edge of the crater, glancing at the static sprawl of machinery below and the watchful wax gallery above. The whole universe had apparently stopped to enable this moment—my communion, after a long hiatus, with the dead. The ghost world was requesting my return.
For better or worse, I entered its womb.
Crunch, crunch. The loose gravel underfoot advertised my arrival.
The boy vanished. Before me lay a path lit with bulbs from a bygone era, their carbon filaments glowing and hissing as I neared, fading away as I passed, like bewitched tapers. These fixtures were soldered to the walls, their wiring so antiquated I wondered if I was imagining the whole thing. Who would possibly use such lighting at the end of the twentieth century?
I got my answer soon enough. The glaring figures on the hill had been only a preview. The tunnel widened into a grotto, and there, gathered in the dank, stood my real audience—hundreds of men and women, like some secret society of the dead, reeking of the upturned grave. The boy guide was among them, standing at the fore, and I finally caught a glimpse of his face—or what was left of it. The flesh had been eaten away by maggots, and in place of his nose was a hollow oozing slime. He had no eyes.
My knees went soft.
The others were just like him—bony, ravaged, decomposed, what all human beings look like after their time on earth was done. I’d never seen so many gathered in one place, with all their attention focused on one thing: me.
What did they want from me? Pity? Revenge? I wasn’t about to stay long enough to find out.
I turned to leave, but more of the dead materialized, their movements stiff and jagged, closing me off from the way I had come. I suddenly thought of the Minotaur in his maze and wished I’d brought my own ball of string. I wasn’t ready to die yet, not here, not when my escape from the Isle had been so close. So damn close.
“Forgive me,” I whispered. “Forgive us.”
My words reverberated through the cave as if I’d shouted. Every step I took produced an inordinately loud crunch.
Faces emerged, distinct, in the flickering light only to melt back into the darkness once more. Malays, Chinese, Parsees, South Indians, Eurasians, Anglo-Saxons, Jews…every one devastated by the elements, devoured by time. Every one missing eyes.
One face in the middle of the crowd burned into the light—and stayed. It was a Chinese woman, her gray skull exposed through a scrim of long, white hair. I recognized her jade-green cheongsam; she wore no pearls, however—the undertakers doubtless stole them because she had no children to complain.
“Mrs. Odell!” I cried, my voice quavering.
She stepped aside. Standing behind her was a skeleton in a gray suit. His head hung limply on his shoulder—Mr. Odell, of course. Although their appearance frightened me, I knew they would do me no harm. I’d paid for her burial; I’d ensured their reunion.
But without eyes, could they even recognize me?
“Help me, please!”
The stench of rotting flesh flooded my nose and mouth as if liquid, and I forced back the urge to gag—it would only reveal my fear, my revulsion, my mortality. The Odells didn’t come forward. There was no choice; I had to wade through the others to reach them.
I kept my eyes low. The light, thankfully, was dim and erratic. Pushing through this gathering of corpses, the ground crunching beneath my feet, I told myself to think of the place as an abandoned butchery. The slabs were extruding the juices of putrefaction, yes, but like flesh and bone, decay was the stuff of life and nothing to be afraid of.
Nevertheless, the hairs on my arms prickled. My knees grew weaker with each step. I felt as if everyone in the cave was holding their breath—if they had any breath left to hold—waiting for me to be completely enclosed in their midst so they might crush me and claim me as their own.
The end would be painful; this much I knew. They had cause. I would be punished. I would be made to suffer. But my dying would be nothing compared to my death. I’d be condemned to walk the earth as one of them.
The ghost-hunter becoming a ghost. The archness of the irony.
“Mr. Odell,” I pleaded as I staggered on, eyes still on the ground.
As the light shifted, I discovered that the dreadful crunching underfoot came not from loose gravel. I was stepping on fragments of bone, rosaries, coffin shards, black clumps of human hair. A shiver rushed up my leg as I lifted my left foot and saw a set of teeth. Beneath my right foot was a large chip from someone’s headstone, its dedication in Farsi. Every step I took was another desecration. The entire tunnel was filled with lost memories, all of them mixed and mashed. Soon, trains would rumble through here, turning this final resting ground into a crossroads, a spot of perpetual transit.
If the ghosts took me, I, too, would be absorbed into this anonymous jumble. It would be as if I’d never lived…
Calm down, I warned myself. Panic only ensured I would become a ghost.
Calm down. Go to the Odells.
But there was no happy reunion when I reached Odell and his wife. The two pushed their cold, hard bodies toward me. They didn’t stop at an embrace. No, they wanted more. They began squeezing me, Odell from the front, his wife from behind. Perhaps to be born into death, both parents were required, as in life.
I shut my eyes and took a deep breath. The reek by now had ceased to register as mere smell. The air had grown so heavy it was becoming impossible to inhale.
Yet I had to try pleading once more. “I can do more for you alive than dead.”
Even as I spoke those words, my desire to live was slipping away. I was exhausted, nauseated, my lungs empty. Terror was being overtaken by the dull ache of resignation. Why fight? Wasn’t I already old and wrecked?
I stopped struggling, but my death parents went on squeezing me tighter and tighter. I felt the cracking of bones, though I couldn’t tell if they were theirs or mine. The three of us were now so enjoined, so complete. It took me by surprise, my readiness to submit—to sleep, to suffocation. I no longer cared if the world forgot me. I was in my parents’ arms. This family of death was more than enough for me. Their misery was all-consuming, deeper and more relentless than any I’d known—because it never had to end.
It was a greedy grief. All I had to do was yield. Completely.
But somewhere in the muddy labyrinth of my mind, I thought of the pontianak, the war, the girls on Blood Hill…I’d survived worse monsters. Why surrender now?
And in that moment, an annoying buzz began nipping at my ear. It wasn’t quite a voice, but the shadow of a voice, like the shushing I’d heard at the cemetery years ago. Only now I could understand it. A language whose meaning suddenly washed clear.
Look around, Odell beseeched. Look what you’ve done.
Not me, I wanted to protest. But I had no voice to speak with.
Other whispers began, in a myriad of tongues so soft and tangled they sounded like wind blowing through the undergrowth.
You promised us this would never happen. You promised us we could rest.
Then two words exploded through the grotto, in the coldest crackle:
Kenneth Kee.
With that, my death parents released me back into the living. Air rushed into my lungs and I dropped to the ground, wheezing and gagging.
They had believed what I’d told them. I would be more useful alive than dead.
Violet’s driver took me home for a change of clothes and then on to the prime minister’s home. When he dropped me at their door, he whispered, “Good luck.”
Even in the night, the old Wee house glowed. Kenneth had maintained Mr. Wee’s all-white palette, except the prime minister’s paint shimmered, a brighter, whiter white.
Violet had been watching from the window. She opened the front door before I could even ring the bell. The foyer was a startling sight—done up, to match the exterior, in antisepti
c white. The servants had been dismissed, which was just as well. I was in no mood for tea or even cognac.
A large childhood portrait of Violet in a short blue dress hung along the staircase, the only thing adorning the bare walls. I hadn’t remembered it from the old days, though the prepubescent scowl was certainly true to life.
“My daughter,” Violet said quickly, nodding at the painting. “She’s all grown up now. But this is how we prefer to remember her.” She clutched my arm to secure my fullest attention. “So, what did you find out?”
“Let me speak to Kenneth.”
Violet glared at me with her old stubborn hostility.
“Believe me, Vi, seeing him is the last thing I want to do, but the spirits have given me no choice.”
“Tell me what they want, and I’ll relay it to him.”
“This is something I have to tell him in person. It involves what he and I did before you came into the picture.”
Her stony mien crumbled. “Years ago, I asked you, I begged you, to stop hounding us—”
“Vi, you asked me here tonight.”
Gripping the side of the staircase for support, she unleashed a banshee wail. If Kenneth had cared a whit about her, he would have come running. But from the barren halls of the house came not a sound.
“Why can’t you…Why don’t you just make them go away?”
“Because I didn’t summon them. He did.”
For his study, Kenneth had chosen the old library, where I’d stumbled into him while seeking refuge from my own engagement party. We were so young then. At that first meeting, the possibility of anything between us was absurd. What we shared then, aside from a mutual distaste for Violet, was a mutual mistrust. Now, all these years later, we had come full circle.
Violet knocked on the door.
“Ken!”
The door unlocked with a sharp click but remained shut.
“Jusht Casshandra,” said Kenneth, his voice ravaged.