The Girl and the Ghost

by Hanna Alkaf

Love her.

  And this was how she repaid him?

  To leave him—banish him—for a mere human girl?

  He would show her.

  He would show them both.

  Sixteen

  Girl

  THE FIRST DAY without Pink, Suraya woke up feeling as light as a cloud. She floated through her usual morning routine: brush your teeth, make sure to get that little gap between those two front ones, good job Suraya, now shower, oops, that water’s cold, dry yourself carefully everywhere, every little bit, that’s it. It was strange to think that the only voice occupying her head was hers. She felt giddy and effervescent, her thoughts fizzing like bubbles floating to the top of a glass of ice-cold cola. And she carried that feeling with her all day long, and into the next day, and the next. Pink was a good friend, she could admit this to herself unreservedly, but being friends with him was like walking a tightrope. You had to be careful where you stepped, what your next move would be. You had to be watchful and wary and alert always. You could never relax.

  And so even though Jing was in the hospital, even though Suraya worried about her friend, even though she spent most of her time alone, even though she felt a tiny pang of guilt about feeling the way she did . . . she was also, in a way, happy. She sat with Jing for hours, playing card games, trading her stories of teachers and fellow students and school-day woes with Jing’s stories of doctors and nurses and patients and their visitors. She filled page after page of her sketchbook, pictures leaping from her pen as if a dam had been removed from its tip. She read for hours, sitting in a pool of sun on the rocks by the river and trying not to think about the last time she was there, with Pink, and the harsh words they’d exchanged then. In fact, she tried not to think about Pink at all.

  Of course, like it or not, she was going to have to start thinking about him again very soon.

  The problem with parting ways with a friend, particularly when that friend happens to be a supernatural being, is that they often take out their displeasure at your decision in ways that go far beyond the realm of human possibility.

  The first sign of Pink’s rage was the smell.

  It appeared a few days after the breakup. Suraya woke up from strange, disturbing dreams that she couldn’t quite remember, only to be greeted by a horrible stench, a stench like bad eggs and rotting corpses, a stench so bad she thought she might actually throw up.

  She jumped out of bed and flew out of the door to find her mother. “Mama,” she called, holding her nose. “What is that terrible smell?”

  But her mother just looked at her strangely from where she stood, slicing carrots for soup. “What smell?”

  Suraya stared, open-mouthed. “What do you mean, what smell? This smell, the one like . . . like . . . like the garbage truck on a hot day!”

  Still Mama just looked at her, and Suraya soon realized that nobody else smelled the smell but her—not Mama, not any of her classmates or teachers, not Jing or Jing’s mother when she visited them at the hospital, not a single person but Suraya herself.

  It was Pink, she knew, Pink punishing her for what he thought of as her disloyalty, Pink expecting her to call on him, apologize, beg to be saved.

  But if that’s what Pink expected, he didn’t know her at all. Suraya gritted her teeth and endured the smell. Days went by, and still she endured. She endured it as it coated her tongue and rendered food inedible; she endured it as it made water turn sour in her mouth; she endured it as it blanketed her in a layer of filth that made showers futile. At night, when she finally fell asleep, it crept into her dreams and tinged them with darkness.

  The nightmares were the second sign.

  She came home from school one day to find her mother in the kitchen, stirring a pot on the stove. “Set the table,” Mama said, ladling steaming curry into a big white bowl, and so she did, pulling glasses out of the cupboard above the sink where they were kept, setting the big blue plates carefully in the center of the yellow placemats. Mama put rice on her plate, a big helping of thick curry lumpy with contents that Suraya couldn’t quite make out. Together they read the pre-meal duaa, and then Suraya tucked in, making a neat parcel out of the rice and curry and fresh greens and sambal with her fingers and shoveling it into her mouth. It was delicious, though she couldn’t quite make out what it was, and with every mouthful she tried to figure it out. Was it fish? Chicken? Beef, perhaps? Each time, the answer eluded her.

  Finally, she turned to her mother. “What is this in the curry, Mama?”

  “Ladies’ fingers,” her mother replied, chewing placidly.

  Suraya frowned. “But that can’t be it,” she said, poking the morsels on her plate, which looked nothing like the long green pods her mother often added to curries or fried in sambal. “This tastes like meat. Not vegetables.”

  Mama stared at her as though she’d said the stupidest thing in the world. “No,” she said again. “They’re ladies’ fingers.” And she picked up the bowl and shoved it into Suraya’s face so that the curry was inches away from her nose, so that she could see for herself the fingers swimming in the thick brown gravy, some long and thin, some short and squat, some still wearing their nails, others with bare spots where nails ought to be. “It was quite challenging harvesting enough,” Mama said nonchalantly as Suraya choked and spluttered. “But I managed it, in the end. All you need is a good sharp knife. . . .”

  Suraya never heard the rest because she started to scream, and it was the sound of her own screams ringing in her ears that woke her up with a start, cold sweat streaming down her face.

  That was only the first. There were more, many more, sometimes two or three on the same night. She often mused, during the daytime when the world was flooded with light, that the dreams would have been fine if they were merely peopled with strange creatures and horrific monsters. Those she could handle. The problem was that the nightmares were twisted versions of reality, vivid scenarios that started out perfectly normal and quickly spiraled out of control, and so real that she sometimes had trouble figuring out what had really happened, and what hadn’t.

  By the time Jing Wei came back to school, it had been two weeks since the red paint incident and the rainy season was in full swing, each day an endless gray blur of drizzle and dreariness. Suraya saw her as she stepped out of her mother’s red Mercedes, carefully shielding her cast from the rain as she made her way into the hall, and her heart lifted crazily. “Jing!” she called, waving wildly. “Over here!”

  In the distance, she could see Jing’s face light up as she ran over. But the closer she got, Suraya thought she saw her face change. And when they hugged, it was Jing who held her gently, as if it were Suraya who was broken and not the other way around.

  “What’s the matter?” Jing said, the first words out of her mouth.

  “Matter?” Suraya frowned, confused. “Nothing’s the matter. I missed you so much!”

  “I missed you too.” Jing’s grin was wide, but there was a hint of worry playing on the edges. “But are you sure you’re all right? You don’t look like yourself.”

  Suraya shrugged. “Just been having some trouble sleeping,” she said. It was, of course, a bold-faced lie. Between the smell and the nightmares, she’d barely eaten or slept in the past two weeks, and she knew that it showed—more than once, teachers had pulled her up sharply in class for not paying attention, and the world was starting to take on a hazy, unreal quality, as if she were wandering through a fog all the time.

  Still, Jing was back, and with her friend beside her, Suraya felt like she could handle anything Pink threw her way.

  So she linked her arm through Jing’s and smiled. “I have so much to tell you,” she said. “Wait till you hear—Mrs. Sumathi has a boyfriend!”

  “No way!” Jing’s eyes were wide, and she drew closer to hear this tantalizing gossip about their English teacher, who wore ornate sarees and a perpetual frown. “But she’s ancient, though!”

  “Way! And her boyfriend’s, like, ten years younger
than she is! Jane’s mother saw them together at the cinema . . .”

  And as they walked arm in arm through the sea of girls waiting for the bell to ring, you might have heard a low growl in the shadows, felt it ripple through the air. Or you might have thought it was thunder ripping through the rain. Who knows? Suraya was just happy to have her friend back, and she didn’t hear a thing.

  Seventeen

  Ghost

  SOMETIMES HE FELT bad. Sometimes he thought twice, three times, four times, five, about flicking his little antennae and turning his once-beloved master’s life to chaos.

  Not his master. Not anymore. Just Suraya. Just some girl.

  I am a dark spirit, he told himself firmly. Created to perform dark deeds. She cut me loose, and now she must pay the price.

  It was easy. He just let all his anger and his jealousy and his hurt and his pain lead the way.

  And the entire time, he tried to ignore the twinge in the pit of his stomach that just didn’t seem to want to go away.

  Eighteen

  Girl

  ONCE, AT JING’S house, they’d been watching a movie—not Star Wars, for once. It was meant to be a romance, one of those will-they-won’t-they setups that you know are actually a they-will-because-they’re-the-two-best-looking-people-on-the-screen types. Jing, surprisingly, was a sucker for sappy movies. Only this one kept stuttering and skipping, until Jing popped it out of the DVD player and buffed it vigorously with her sleeve.

  The next phase of Pink’s haunting made Suraya’s life jump like a scratched-up DVD. Swathes of time would pass in the space of a blink, without her even realizing it.

  Skip.

  There they were at the table, Mama and Suraya, and Suraya was silently rearranging the rice and sambal jawa and freshly fried fish into shifting patterns on her plate, trying to make it look like she was eating.

  Skip.

  She opened her eyes to find herself in the shower, gasping and spluttering under the furious spray, lungs desperate for air, the skin on her fingers and toes wrinkled to the consistency of raisins. How long have I been standing here?

  Skip.

  And now she was in her bedroom, sitting at her plain wooden desk, her sketchbook open before her, pen in hand. There was a picture on the page in front of her: an intricate tangle of flowers and leaves and vines in stark black ink on the snowy paper. Did I draw that? She must have, somehow, only . . . only she couldn’t quite remember.

  She stared at the page and sighed.

  Something on the page sighed back.

  Suraya’s heart began to pound hard in her chest, a rhythmic thudding that echoed in her ears.

  Beneath the flowers, somewhere in the dark spaces where the vines and the leaves intertwined, something began to move.

  She could see it, dark and writhing, and she could hear it, its breath a wet, heavy rasping, and she could feel it, most of all—an icy coldness in the tropical heat of her bedroom, a hole ripped in the canvas of reality. Its movements were slow and sinuous, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that it was coming closer to the surface, ready to break free of its paper prison.

  The movement stopped, and it was like the entire world held its breath.

  Then slowly, softly, ink began to bleed in thin little lines down the page, from the very center of her drawing down, down, down to the bottom of the page. From there, it moved in steady streams and rivulets across the desk, pooling in the dings and scratches on the surface on its way to the edge. And then finally, it began to drip steadily onto the floor at Suraya’s feet.

  And though she trembled like a leaf in a storm, she stayed where she was, first because she was so afraid, and later because she couldn’t move if she wanted to. The ink that puddled on the floor grabbed at her feet, tiny strings of black reaching up to latch onto her skin, weaving a net to keep her where she was. Then as she watched, it slowly began to creep up her legs, turning everything it touched black as midnight, steadily laying claim on her body as if it was its own to take.

  Just as she felt the slick touch of it on her neck, she heard a voice whisper in her ear, a voice that sounded remarkably like Pink’s.

  You will not be rid of me so easily.

  Nineteen

  Girl

  THEY DIDN’T TALK about that night ever again. Not about how Mama had burst into the room, her face a mixture of shock and confusion at the sound of Suraya’s piercing screams. Not about how she’d had to pry her daughter’s stiff fingers from where they clutched the edge of the desk so hard that the nails had gouged dents into the wood; Suraya had had to pull out three splinters afterward, each long thin sliver piercing through her skin like a tiny spear. Not about how the sobs had stopped only so that Suraya could empty the contents of her stomach—not that there’d been much in there to begin with—down the front of Mama’s batik kaftan.

  Instead, Mama went into teacher mode, full of talk about Actionable Next Steps. “You are clearly not well,” she said, after cleaning them both up and popping Suraya into her bed. “We will see a doctor tomorrow.”

  She patted her daughter’s pale cheek hesitantly, as if she’d studied it in one of the books she taught her students. “You will be okay,” she said.

  “Yes, Mama,” Suraya murmured sleepily, exhausted from wrestling with vomit and nightmares. Did doctors treat ghostly maladies? It was worth a shot, she supposed.

  The doctor’s room was hot and humid, the only air coming from a lone standing fan that whirred noisily as it rotated from left to right and back again. “Sorry ah, air cond rosak,” the plump nurse murmured as she showed them in, pointing to an aging air-conditioning unit that looked as if it had been there since air conditioners were invented. Suraya’s skin prickled in the heat, and as she pushed the long sleeves of her baju kurung top up to her elbows, she wondered how much sweat was trapped under the nurse’s black hijab. As the nurse walked away, the cloth covering her head writhed and moved, revealing not hair beneath, but a wriggling mass of dark snakes gasping for air. One hissed at Suraya primly—What’re you looking at?—before tugging the hijab back into place with a fanged mouth.

  Dr. Leong was a pleasant-faced older man, his dark hair streaked with gray, his glasses thick and rimmed in tortoiseshell. He tutted as he looked Suraya over, placing his cold stethoscope on her chest to listen to her heartbeat, sticking a thermometer in her ear to check her temperature. “Temperature okay,” he said to Mama, who sat clutching her purse on her lap. “No fever. But she looks quite skinny for her height, and she’s very pale. You eating, girl?” He poked her gently in the ribs, smiling a toothy smile. “Not doing one of those diet things you young girls like so much, right? Boys don’t like girls too skinny, you know.”

  Good thing I don’t particularly like boys who have stupid opinions about my body, Suraya thought to herself. She knew his type. So many adults ask you questions without any real interest in listening to your answers, and Dr. Leong was one of them.

  So she just smiled weakly at the doctor and focused on the posters on his wall: a faded food chart. What You Need to Know about Shingles. A bright yellow poster with a harsh crimson line slashed across a sinister-looking mosquito, bearing the slogan Destroy Aedes, Defeat Denggue. She tried not to let the misspelling bother her, and failed.

  The mosquito turned its head to look at her. He’ll destroy you, it whispered. Suraya shivered.

  “Watch her diet,” Dr. Leong was saying to her mother. “Maybe some supplements. She needs more iron.” As expected, he spoke as if she wasn’t even there.

  Mama was nodding and gathering herself up to leave when he coughed delicately.

  “It also looks like she got some things on her mind,” the doctor said, with the air of a man who realizes he’s tiptoeing through a field of thorns. “Maybe you want to take her to a therapist? Some counseling? I know not everyone believes in that kind of thing . . .”

  Mama’s face was like a window with its curtains tightly drawn. “Thank you, Doctor,” she said, rising and ge
sturing for Suraya to do the same. “We will certainly take all your suggestions onboard.”

  “Sure, sure.” He drew a neatly folded handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his forehead with it; Suraya had not known there was a man left on the planet who still carried a handkerchief. As she watched, the white square flopped forward slightly at the corner, revealing an open, yawning mouth that began to gnaw at the doctor’s face. “Just a suggestion, you know.”

  “Of course.”

  He coughed again, this time with a note of apology. “Pay bill outside, ya.” He slipped the handkerchief back into his shirt pocket and waved them goodbye, and Suraya tried to ignore the gaping wound that bloomed on his cheek, painfully red and oozing blood. It’s not real, she told herself. It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real.

  As they walked to the car, Mama with her purse, Suraya with the white plastic bag that held pills she knew would do her absolutely no good at all in one hand and a small piece of paper excusing her from school for a few days (“So you can get some rest,” Dr. Leong had said) in the other, she found her voice. “I don’t need a therapist,” she told Mama. It surprised her how timid she sounded.

  “We’ll see,” was all Mama said in response.

  They got into the car. The afternoon heat had turned the seats into searing hot flesh roasters, and Suraya was careful to keep her hands away from the burning leather.

  They baked gently all the way back home.

  Time oozed by slowly that day, and the day after, and the day after that. Mama went to work as usual, though not without a long list of instructions for Suraya. “Rest well. Don’t forget to eat. And take your medicine like a good girl.” There were no hugs or kisses; but then again, there rarely were.

  The heat, the smell, and the constant struggle to maintain her grip on reality made Suraya’s head ache. Still she battled grimly against her visions, turning her head when the shadows the trees outside threw on the wall melded together into something that grinned menacingly at her, gritting her teeth when Mama presented her with a plate of staring eyeballs where meatballs should have been, ignoring the flesh that melted off the faces on the TV show they watched after dinner, leaving only the perfect teeth of the actors gleaming in their clean white skulls.