The Girl and the Ghost

by Hanna Alkaf

  He can’t go on like this forever, she thought to herself. He loves me. Pink loves me. But with each fresh horror, she believed it a little less.

  Drawing helped. She spent many an afternoon at her desk, bathed in sunlight, hunched as usual over her sketchbook. Opening it—touching it, even—had been a struggle after her nightmare, but she told herself she was being silly. It was a dream. Dreams weren’t real.

  Her pen flew busily over the book, comfortably familiar in the crook of her hand. She was working on a study of hands—she never could get hands right, they were such tricky things—and the page was filled with them: hands with fingers spread apart; hands clenched into tight fists, each knuckle carefully shaded; hands with long, elegant fingers; hands with stubby fingers and nails caked in dirt; hands reaching out as though asking for help.

  It was a relief to think about something other than Pink, for once.

  She leaned back with a sigh, rubbing her aching back, satisfied with the work she’d produced. The last hand was the best one so far, she thought, the play of light and shadow perfectly rendered, the position of the fingers poised, natural. “Good job,” she told herself aloud.

  On the page, the fingers twitched.

  She did her best not to notice. “All done,” she said quickly, slamming the book shut. “Why am I even talking to myself?” she muttered.

  But she knew it wasn’t herself she was talking to.

  The sketchbook moved on her desk, very slightly.

  She stared at it. It looked unassuming enough, its familiar black cover scratched and slightly dented from use.

  As she watched, it moved again, shifting ever so slightly closer to the edge of the desk.

  She got up then, walking quickly to the window. Outside, the sun shone almost unbearably bright on the village, bleaching everything white and making her eyes water. “Nothing is happening,” she whispered. “Everything is fine. Nothing is happening. Everything is fine.” If she said it often enough, it might come true.

  There was a bang, so loud that it made her whirl around, her heart pounding in her throat.

  The sketchbook was on the floor, open to the page filled with hands. And the hands were moving.

  Not just moving; they were reaching up and out of the book, pushing past the paper barrier, beckoning her closer.

  Suraya ran.

  She leaped over the book, feeling the phantom hands just graze her right foot as she flew over them, and ran straight for the door, banging it shut behind her, leaning all her weight against it as she breathed hard, palms clammy, heart still banging in her chest like a drum solo.

  From behind the door, there was silence.

  And then there wasn’t.

  It was a strange sound, a sort of rhythmic thump and scrape that she couldn’t quite work out. Slowly, she kneeled on the floor and bent down to peer through the sliver of space beneath the door.

  The hands were making their way closer and closer, gripping the floor for purchase and dragging her sketchbook along inch by inch behind them.

  She leaped up and backed away. There was no way for them to open the door, surely? Her thoughts swung wildly first one way, then the other. Should she scream? Should she run?

  And then suddenly, she felt a wave of anger wash over her.

  She was tired of running.

  And she was tired of this.

  “Come and get me, you jerks!” she yelled.

  The thumping stopped.

  Then one by one, she saw them burst out from beneath the door: a dozen paper-white hands straining to reach her. The air was filled with agonized, angry shrieks, a hundred high-pitched voices raised in fury and frustration. Suraya put her fingers over her ears, trying to block out the sound, but there was no escaping it.

  Her eyes fell on where the iron stood on its board in the corridor, between Mama’s room and her own, just so they could each get to it whenever they needed to without disturbing the other. It was black and old-fashioned, so heavy that lifting it made her arms ache.

  She could use it now.

  With the shrieks and screams ringing in her ears, Suraya grabbed the iron and brought it down with all her strength on the outstretched hands trying their best to swipe at her ankles, mashing them into the floor. And then she did it again. Then again. She didn’t stop until all that was left was a mess of paper and ink puddling on the floor like blood.

  The final scream was long and terrible and filled with so much rage that it made her tremble.

  When it finally died away, when nothing was left but silence, she let the iron slip from her quivering fingers with a clang and slithered to the ground, her knees suddenly too weak to hold her weight.

  “I can’t do this anymore, Pink,” she said, and her voice was sad and broken. “I can’t keep going on like this. You have to stop doing this to me.”

  But this time there was no reply, not even from the mosquitoes that buzzed around her.

  Twenty

  Girl

  THEY’D HAD A talk about bullies at Suraya’s old school once. It was run by one of those passionate young teachers who descended upon the village starry-eyed and with big plans in their heads and left a year or two later crumpled and weary and drained. The type who spoke in ALL CAPS when they were excited about something.

  “Bullies are just INSECURE, and taking their INSECURITIES out on YOU,” the teacher had said, practically glowing with enthusiasm (only two months into her stint, the stars still shone bright in her eyes). “You must STAND UP to them. And if that doesn’t work, you MUST tell an ADULT so that they can HELP you.” Her voice dripped with sincerity. “You DON’T have to face this ALONE.” Then they’d run through some deeply embarrassing role-playing exercises where nobody had been quite as invested as the teacher had hoped.

  Suraya wasn’t sure how much of a difference that teacher had made. But she figured that she’d had a point about telling an adult. After all, when you have a problem at school, you raise your hand and someone comes to help you. And this was the biggest problem she’d ever faced in her life.

  It was time to raise her hand.

  It was the hour between dinner and bedtime, and Mama was sitting at the dining table, piles of exercise books towering in front of her. Her red pen worked its way busily down page after page, the scratch of its nib against paper punctuated only by the disapproving click of her tongue when she came across a particularly silly mistake. For once, the nightmares kept their distance; the pen stayed a pen, the books stayed books.

  Fortune favors the bold, Pink’s voice whispered in her ear, and she almost wanted to laugh at how strange it was to think of him now, of all times.

  Instead she took a deep breath and walked up to the table.

  “Mama?”

  “Hmm?” Mama looked up, deep lines of irritation scrunching up her forehead. The fluorescent light caught the threads of silver running through her black hair and made them glow. “What is it?”

  “I have . . . a problem.”

  “Hmm.” Her mother closed the book she was marking with a soft thump and peered at her, and Suraya felt her stomach shrink. “What kind of problem? Is it maths? Your teacher used to tell me you never concentrated properly in maths. Maybe you need extra classes.”

  “Umm, no, that’s not it.” The absolute last thing she wanted to add to her ever-growing list of reasons her life currently sucked was more maths. “It’s more like . . . a problem with bullies.”

  “Bullies?” She had Mama’s full attention now, and she wasn’t sure that she liked it. She wiped her damp palms on her pajama pants and tried to avoid Mama’s piercing stare. “You mean at that new school of yours? Who has been bullying you?” The sigh that followed was loaded with disappointment. “Honestly. Big fancy school like that, you’d think they’d have better policies in place to monitor student interaction. . . .”

  “It’s nobody at school,” Suraya said quickly. If Mama got on the topic of What Schools Should Be Doing to Better Serve Teachers and Studen
ts they would never get anywhere. She watched as Mama’s expression switched from irritation to one of confusion.

  “Then who . . .” A look of understanding began to dawn. “You know,” she began in that overly casual way that meant she was thinking very hard about how to be casual, “girl friendships can be very complicated. There’s often an element of competition and insecurity about it. Girls can be very catty. . . .”

  Was she talking about Jing? With a creeping sense of horror, Suraya realized that she was. “It’s not Jing!” she cried, aghast at the very thought. That Mama would think of frank, funny Jing as a mean girl! The idea would have made her laugh if she wasn’t busy tying herself up in knots.

  “Then what, Suraya?” Mama’s brows had snapped back together. The irritation was back now, and it had bled into her voice, adding a harsh sharpness to its edges.

  Tell her, Suraya, she told herself firmly. You have to tell her.

  “I’m being bullied by a ghost,” she blurted out.

  Mama’s eyebrows shot up so high they almost disappeared into her hairline.

  “A . . . ghost?”

  Mama didn’t believe her. And why should she? You sound ridiculous.

  Suraya couldn’t tell anymore whether that was Pink’s voice or her own in her head, and it frightened her. Her heart sank right down to the very soles of her feet. She wished she could reach out and pluck the words right out of the air, erase them somehow so that this whole thing had never happened.

  “What kind of ghost?”

  The words sent her flying back to her senses. Mama’s eyes were carefully blank, giving away nothing. Was she serious? Was she making fun? It was hard to tell.

  “A . . . a ghost who sometimes looks like a grasshopper?” Her uncertainty made every sentence come out sounding like a question. “He says my grandmother gave him to me? After she died?”

  Was it her imagination, or did a ripple just pass through Mama’s face, as though a breeze had tweaked the curtain aside, just an inch?

  “Your grandmother,” she said. She hadn’t moved, but the air around them suddenly felt thicker, harder to suck in.

  “That’s . . . that’s what he said?” Mama motioned for her to continue, and she poured out the whole story, from meeting Pink for the first time when she was five, to Jing’s run-in with the bullies, to the nightmares. “He says I won’t be rid of him so easily,” she said, rubbing her aching head. “But I don’t think I can take much more, Mama. I’m scared.”

  The silence was a long one, and each second of it made Suraya’s heart fold into itself, until she thought it might disappear altogether.

  Then from her mother came a long, soft sigh. “A pelesit,” she murmured, as if to herself. “Of course, Ma, up to your usual tricks even in the end, curse you.”

  “Tricks? Curse?” Suraya swallowed back a sudden lump that had appeared in her throat and didn’t seem to want to go away.

  Mama straightened up in her seat and turned to look at Suraya. Her gaze was unwavering, and when she spoke, her tone was serious. “Listen to me, Suraya. Your grandmother had dangerous ideas and played with dangerous knowledge. This . . . thing that is bothering you . . . it was not made for good, do you understand? It is an evil thing, a dark thing.”

  “Evil?” Suraya frowned. “I don’t think Pink’s evil, Mama. He just loves me too much.”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea to depend too much on his love,” her mother said. “Not when all that love is doing is hurting you.” Mama sighed a deep, exhausted sigh, gathering up the exercise books and stacking them neatly in one corner of the table. “I’m going to get some help. This requires an expert.”

  She placed a hand on Suraya’s shoulder and bent down to look her in the eyes. “We will solve this problem,” Mama told her. “Don’t worry.”

  But as she walked back to her room, Suraya did worry. Because she’d looked back and seen Mama’s face. Unguarded, the curtains had been flung open, the glass cracked from side to side.

  Mama was very, very frightened indeed.

  Twenty-One

  Ghost

  THE NEXT DAY, the ghost watched the scene unfold from his perch, right at the corner of where walls met ceiling, cloaked in shadows.

  The coffee table was laid with what he recognized as Mama’s good lacy table runner, the one Suraya had “borrowed” once to wrap around her waist like a fancy princess skirt; that had earned her an earful when Mama found out. The carefully polished silver tray on top of it held plates of treats, a large red-capped jar of murukku, and the ornate cups with matching saucers that they only used for guests.

  He had been listening the whole time, of course. He wasn’t sure who Mama’s “expert help” would turn out to be, but he’d seen many “spiritual practitioners” in his time, and they were almost always true to type: men with beards that ran the spectrum from black to white, from those who truly wanted to help and believed they could to those who wanted nothing more than the feel of crisp new notes of money in their palms.

  This one was . . . different.

  Pink crept carefully out of the darkness to get a better look at the plump, bespectacled man who sat in the living room now, nibbling on leftover Eid cookies and drinking sweet, hot tea. “Delicious,” he said, as he reached for yet another one of the biscuits stacked on the delicate china platter, the layers of flaky dough making a satisfying crunch as he bit down to get to its sticky center. “What do you call these things?”

  “Heong peng.”

  “Ah yes, a Perak specialty, am I right?”

  Mama nodded stiffly. “I grew up eating them; I am very fond of them.”

  She called him Encik Ali. He had a sprinkling of hair on his upper lip and chin that could probably pass as a mustache and beard if you were feeling kind enough that day, and he was wearing round glasses with thin black frames and smudged lenses, and a pale gray jubah. Cookie crumbs and stray bits of murukku nestled in its folds. Suraya sat in the chair opposite, hands folded in her lap, pale and watchful. Pink searched her face for some sign of what she thought about all of this and saw nothing but skepticism behind her mask of politeness. He couldn’t help himself; he felt his nonexistent heart swell with pride. That’s my girl. Don’t fall for their nonsense.

  “Mmm, mmm.” Encik Ali nodded after he’d heard Suraya’s story, mopping the dregs of tea from the corners of his mouth with the flowery napkins Mama had made Suraya dig up from deep within a kitchen drawer. “It does seem to be a classic case of pelesit, yes. And from your mother, you say?” He turned to Mama, his eyebrows quirked questioningly. “She was a . . . practitioner of . . . those types of things?”

  “She was a witch,” Mama said flatly. “And she could not stop even if she tried. It’s part of why I left, a long time ago.”

  “Indeed, indeed,” the man muttered, nodding again. “And no one can blame you for it. It cannot have been an easy childhood. . . .”

  “Back to the matter at hand,” Mama said, raising her voice to just shy of outright rudeness. “What can we do, Encik Ali? Can you help my daughter? She is a good girl, a girl who does as she’s told. She doesn’t deserve to be swept up in . . . all of this.”

  “Mmm,” he said again, scratching the patchy hair on his chin. “I believe I can, yes. You know I am a pawang, and we have certain powers. Some people call a pawang hujan when the drought hurts their crops and they want to call upon the rain. Some people call a pawang buaya when a crocodile threatens the safety of their villages and it needs handling. Me, I am a pawang hantu, and they call me when they have problems of a . . . spiritual nature. So you did the right thing.”

  Pawang hantu? Pink felt a sudden cold prickling tiptoe up his back. He had not expected this man, this bumbling, genial, crumb-dusted man, to really be able to handle ghosts and monsters. Could he really do this? Could he really be Pink’s downfall?

  Was this . . . fear?

  The pawang turned to Suraya. “Can you withstand a few more days of this, child? Are you strong
enough, brave enough?”

  “I think so,” Suraya said. “I hope so.”

  “Mmm, very well then.” The pawang dabbed at his shiny forehead with his napkin. “The full moon is in five days.”

  “That’s when I usually feed him,” she said. “For . . . for the binding.”

  The pawang nodded. “That is when whatever rituals and incantations we use are most powerful, you see. And he needs you then, no matter how angry he may be with you. Your blood is the only thing keeping him tied to this world. Your blood is the bait.” A stray piece of murukku fell out of a fold onto his lap; he picked it up and absentmindedly popped it into his mouth. “A full moon is a marvelous and fearsome thing,” he said, chewing thoughtfully.

  “My mother used to say the same thing,” Mama said, then closed her mouth quickly, as though she’d said too much.

  “I don’t doubt it,” the pawang said quietly, his voice all gentle sympathy. “But it is also a tricky thing, moonlight. It’s like adding sugar to a cake. Add a little and it makes a raw mixture palatable. Add a little more, and an okay cake becomes great. A little more and a great cake becomes a culinary masterpiece, enough to bring grown men to tears. A little more . . . and all is ruined.”

  “What does that mean?” Suraya asked, and Pink wondered the same.

  “Only that we must be careful,” the pawang said, turning his warm smile on her.

  “Will she be all right?” For the first time, there was hesitance in Mama’s voice. “Will it . . . will it hurt her?”

  “No, it shouldn’t hurt. Not for her.”

  Suraya looked at him through narrowed eyes. “Will it hurt him?”

  In that moment, Pink loved her so hard he thought the cavity where his heart ought to be would burst.