The Girl and the Ghost

by Hanna Alkaf

  “Him?” The pawang raised an eyebrow at this as he carefully set his teacup back down on the coffee table. There was a clink as glass hit glass. “Surely you mean it, child.”

  “I mean him,” she said stubbornly. Pink noticed Mama’s lips, now pressed together so tightly a piece of paper couldn’t have passed between them. “What will happen to him?”

  The question seemed to leave the pawang nonplussed. “Well. He would go away.”

  It was at that moment that you might have heard a sharp hiss from the darkest corner of the room, if you were listening.

  “Forever?”

  “If we do it right.”

  The room suddenly seemed darker. Where it had been bright afternoon sunshine just seconds ago, clouds now loomed on the horizon, dark and angry and flickering with lightning. Mama got up then, crossing the room to close the windows against the gathering storm.

  “Will it hurt him?” Suraya asked again.

  The wind turned the rain into sharp, thin whips that lashed unceasingly against the tin roof; it turned the branches of the trees outside into fists that pounded hard against the windowpanes.

  The pawang smiled. “If we do it right,” he said again, and behind those smudged lenses Pink thought he detected a peculiar gleam.

  Suraya shivered, and Pink shivered with her.

  “Do not worry, child,” the pawang said kindly. “I will keep you safe. No harm will come your way. But this thing that haunts you . . . it will keep hurting you unless we banish it, get rid of it forever. Do you understand?”

  She waited a long time to answer, and in the minutes that ticked by, Pink wanted to yell out, tell her that he would not hurt her again, that he could not help himself sometimes but that he would try so hard, so much harder than he was trying now. He could not imagine a world in which he could never see her or be near her again, and he did not want to.

  “Encik Ali is asking you a question, Suraya.” Mama’s teacher voice cut through the silence, the note of authority unmistakable. It was a voice that demanded you sit up straight and pay attention and keep your eyes on your own paper. It was a voice that demanded answers.

  “Yes,” Suraya said softly. “I understand.”

  Outside, the wind howled as if it were a wild beast that someone had stabbed in the heart.

  Twenty-Two

  Girl

  SURAYA LAY IN her bed after the pawang had left and thought for a long, long time. She thought about the smell, and the nightmares, and of Jing’s pale face and purple bruises. She thought about whispered conversations under the covers, and warm hugs at bedtime, and first friendships, and true friendships. She thought about that strange gleam in the pawang’s eyes, the shiver of fear that had run a cold finger down her spine when he spoke. And most of all, she thought about forever, a word that got colder and harder and more unforgiving the longer it sat in her head.

  The shadows were long by the time she sat up. Sweat made her long hair stick to the back of her neck, and she gathered it impatiently up into a sloppy ponytail.

  “Pink,” she whispered.

  It was the first time she’d said his name in days, and it tasted strange and bittersweet and familiar on her tongue.

  The storm was dying out now, and the wind had lost most of its ferocity; the only answer was its whimpers outside her window.

  “Pink,” she said again. This time her voice was clearer, surer.

  The shadows in the corners of the room started to grow larger and darker, as if they were gathering themselves together.

  “I know you’re here, Pink,” Suraya said. “You’re always here. Come out and talk to me.”

  The shadows in the corners flickered for a second, the way they do when a breeze plays with a candle flame.

  Then he was there, not as his true form, but as a grasshopper on her windowsill. Behind him, the sky was lit up with the fiery flames of sunset, and the shadow he cast was huge and vaguely sinister.

  “Hello, Pink.”

  He didn’t speak, so she did instead. “You’re probably wondering why I called you.”

  “I assume it was to say your final goodbye,” he said, and she winced at the unfamiliar harshness in his voice.

  “It wasn’t my idea,” she said.

  “Yet I missed the bit where you launched a passionate protest,” he snapped. “Or perhaps it was smothered by all the betrayal in the air.”

  “Betrayal?” She stared at him, mouth agape, eyes filling with furious tears. “You’re the one who’s been spending all your time trying to hurt my friend! Trying to hurt me!”

  Beneath her feet, she felt a shudder. The room began to tremble, the picture frames clattering slightly against the walls upon which they were hung, the art supplies on her desk clicking and clacking against each other with every movement.

  When he spoke again, Pink’s voice was a deep rumble. “You dropped me as soon as you had another human to be your companion! Me, who has been by your side since you were barely old enough to walk! Me, who has been with you through everything! Who has . . . who has loved you through everything!” The last words flew out of his mouth in a roar that shook the room so hard that Suraya grabbed onto her bedstead, sure she was about to be sent flying across the room. Pens and pencils and books and papers fell or fluttered to the ground. The sound was deafening.

  Pink paused to catch his breath, panting slightly.

  On her bed, Suraya sobbed quietly, her face buried in her hands. With every heave of her little chest, Pink thought his heart would break—if he had one, that is.

  Look at me, he told her.

  It took a while for her to obey. When she did, the fear in her eyes made him tremble.

  She’d never looked at him like that before.

  Pink let out a long, slow sigh, as if he was releasing all the anger from his little body. Then he hopped onto the bed beside her and laid a gentle arm against her leg.

  I am sorry, he whispered. I did not mean to hurt you. I did not like to do it. But my anger billowed and swelled and grew inside me, and, like the wild thing it is, it lashed out when it was wounded. I could not stop it.

  “Did you enjoy it?”

  He looked down at his feet. He could not help feeling ashamed of himself. I did.

  She nodded. “It felt like you did.” There was no note of blame or anger in her voice, just the tiny tremble of leftover tears.

  I will not do it anymore, he told her. Or at least . . . I will try not to.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s in your nature. It’s hard to go against what you were meant to be.”

  I was meant to be your friend. His voice was sad.

  “You will always be my friend, Pink.”

  He looked at her intently. Then why does this sound like a goodbye?

  “It isn’t. Not yet.” Suraya rubbed the tears from her face and sat up, scooping Pink up in her palm and bringing him close to her. “Listen, Pink. In five days, at the full moon, they’re going to make you go away forever, and they won’t do it gently, I know it. I could see it in that man’s eyes.”

  Child. He leaned close and nuzzled her cheek. Child, what can you do in the face of your elders? How can you stop them? You are wise, but still so young.

  He watched her jaw set, that spark of determination light in her eyes, and he knew she would not listen.

  “Fortune favors the bold,” she reminded him.

  He had to smile.

  All right, he said. What do we do?

  Twenty-Three

  Girl

  THE PAWANG HAD come into town driving a trim little camper that he’d parked on the very edge of the village, where the neat, orderly paddy fields butted up against an unapologetically wild, unruly tangle of forest, “so as to keep out of everyone’s way,” he’d said. Such was the demand for his services as a handler of unruly spirits that he saw no use in settling down in one place. “I bring my home with me wherever I go,” he’d told Suraya’s mother earnestly as he left. “And I help whoever I
can, insha Allah.”

  So, even in the inky darkness of midnight under a cloud-clogged sky, it was easy enough for Suraya and Pink to sneak past Mama snoring gently in her usual seat in front of the flickering TV screen and out of the house, through the paths and shortcuts as familiar as the lines on her own palm, to where the battered camper stood, a faint light glowing from one window.

  From his perch on Suraya’s shoulder, Pink sniffed. Explain to me why we are doing this again?

  “I told you,” Suraya whispered back. “There’s something about this guy that just doesn’t feel right. I want to know what he’s up to.”

  Be careful, he told her. But she didn’t answer; she was too busy sidling up against the walls of the camper, stretching on her tiptoes to peek into its streaky windows.

  They are too high for you, he pointed out helpfully. And anyway, the curtains are closed. You would not be able to see.

  She glared at him. “All right, then, Mr. Helpful, you go in there and tell me what you see.”

  He sniffed again and hopped off her shoulder and toward the door of the camper. In the darkness, she could just make out his little body as it wriggled through the keyhole and disappeared.

  He was gone a long time. Suraya shifted her weight from one foot to the other as she waited, wiping the sweat that dripped from her brow with the back of her hand, trying to ignore the shadows that seemed to waver and shift as she watched, the rustling and whispering that wafted from the undergrowth. It’s just the trees, she told herself. Just the wind blowing through the branches. Nothing to worry about.

  Then she heard a sound that had nothing to do with the trees at all, or the screeches of the insects that sang loudly in the still night.

  The click of a door handle.

  She turned just in time to see the door of the camper swing slowly, silently open.

  There was nobody there. There was nothing but the empty doorway, faintly illuminated by the light inside the camper.

  Suraya felt her body begin to tremble all over, and she turned away from the yawning emptiness, ready to run.

  Suraya.

  She looked back. “Pink?”

  She felt the familiar, reassuring tap of his little feet as he landed on her shoulder. It’s all right. There’s nobody here. He’s out.

  Suraya took a deep, shaky breath, trying to steady her thundering heart. “Excellent. Now let’s go see what’s going on.”

  She climbed up the steps of the camper slowly, partly to make sure she didn’t make a sound, partly because her knees still felt decidedly wobbly.

  Inside, the camper was tidy, organized, and achingly, disappointingly normal. The pawang had left a small lamp on, its fluorescent glow straining to light its surroundings. A cursory glance through the contents of the cupboards revealed a small space dedicated to basic cookery ingredients—a little carafe of canola oil, glass jars with salt and sugar beached along the sides, bottles of sauces in every shade and spice variant, from the caramel darkness of sweet soy sauce to the flaming red of a sauce made with tiny, dangerously hot bird’s-eye chilis. The rest held row upon row of leather- and clothbound books, some new, some with flakes of material peeling off the spines like sunburned skin. There were no photographs or ornaments to provide some insight into his solitary life, and no little messes; no papers strewn carelessly over tabletops, no crumpled piles of dirty clothes left to fester on the floor.

  “A place for everything, and everything in its place,” she whispered to herself. It was something Mama often said when Suraya’s room started getting out of control; she didn’t think the pawang had ever been out of control in his life.

  Pink had peeled himself from her shoulder and gone exploring on his own, and she’d almost forgotten where he was until she heard a small gasp from the bedroom.

  Suraya. Come here.

  “Hmm?” She ran her hand over the multicolored spines of the books, trying to make out their titles in the dim light. “In a minute, Pink.”

  Now. Something in his voice made her look up. You need to see this.

  She walked down the narrow little corridor toward him.

  The first thing she noticed was the little bed, perfectly made, the blue bedspread folded so neatly and so tightly over the corners that each one was as sharp as a knife’s edge.

  The second thing she noticed was Pink, sitting squarely in the center of that smooth blue bedspread, his mouth set in a grim line, staring at something right behind her.

  The third thing she noticed, as she slowly turned around, was a wall filled with row upon row of shelves, from floor to ceiling, fitting neatly around the narrow sliver of doorway she’d just come through.

  The fourth thing she noticed was the jars.

  There were so many of them, lined up along each shelf like sentinels, tall jars, thin jars, fat jars, each made of clear glass with a silver top screwed on tight.

  And inside each one, a dark shape.

  Suraya frowned and took a step closer. One jar held what she recognized as a musang, the type of civet that often scrabbled lightly across their roof in the light of the moon, curled up with its eyes shut tight. One held an owl with downy gray feathers and long talons that ended in wicked points; its eyes too were closed. One—and it was at this point that Suraya began to tremble so hard that she felt her teeth tap-tap-tapping against each other in her mouth—held a baby, completely naked, its skin tinged a sickly green, its ears tapering at the tips, the sharp points of tiny fangs resting against its bottom lip as it slept. And more, so many more things she couldn’t even recognize, the stuff of spite and nightmares.

  Taking a deep breath, Suraya bent forward to peer more closely into one of the jars in which there rested something she couldn’t quite make out.

  Two tiny eyes peered back.

  They sat in a tiny face, and the face belonged to a tiny figure, no bigger than the tip of her little finger. It was black all over, and its little limbs ended in wickedly clawed fingers and toes, and it looked at her without blinking.

  She had often read about little girls who found imps and fairies in the woods and made friends with them. This little imp did not look like it wanted to make friends.

  As she watched, it narrowed its eyes, bared a mouth full of sharp, pointed fangs at her, and hissed with such venom that its glass prison shook.

  She backed away quickly, her hands shaking.

  Row upon row of jars, row upon row of dark shapes that had begun to move restlessly against their glass confines. And they were all staring right at her.

  Suraya felt her heart pounding in her ears. Each stare pierced her skin like a thousand tiny pinpricks, and yet somehow she couldn’t move.

  Run, she heard a voice whisper, like the rustling of old leaves, then another, then another, then another, louder and louder until the rustle built itself up into a roar. RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN.

  Suraya. Pink’s voice, urgent and scared, brought her abruptly back to herself. I suggest you do as they tell you.

  And with her ghost clinging to her left shoulder, Suraya raced out of the camper and back home, the words still echoing in her ear with every step.

  In the shadows of the restless banana trees, the pawang watched her go. Behind the smudged lenses of his glasses, his eyes gleamed.

  Twenty-Four

  Ghost

  SURAYA LAY CURLED up in her bed, and she couldn’t stop shaking.

  Pink was worried about her, and it just about killed him that he had no idea how to help her. “What were they?” she asked, over and over again. “What were those . . . those creatures?”

  Pink sat quiet and unmoving on the windowsill, watching as ribbons of sunlight slowly began to lick the corners of the neighboring houses, thinking about those muffled whispers, the pointed stare of hundreds of beady little eyes.

  All manner of dark things, he said quietly. There was a bajang—that’s the civet you saw, that’s the shape it takes. It can cause a type of madness, a delirium, to whoever its maste
r sends it to torment.

  “Its master?” Suraya stared at him. “You mean the pawang?”

  Yes. And it was not the only one. There were more. Pink sighed. The owl is another form taken by the langsuir. She is a type of banshee, preying on pregnant mothers, though I suppose if you have the right skill, she can prey on whoever you want her to. The baby, that was a toyol, a child spirit who can be used by its master to cause all sorts of mischief.

  “And the little one?”

  That was a polong. A spirit bound by blood, like me. It can render its victims deaf and blind to their surroundings, totally unconscious of their own actions, ranting and raving like a lunatic. And there was more than one of those, more than I could count.

  Suraya buried her head in her hands. “I don’t understand. Why is he doing this? What does he want with those . . . those creatures?”

  It seems to me that the man is a Collector, Pink said calmly. I have heard of his kind. They are not content with small, petty bad magics as your grandmother was. They desire greater things, and they use their spirits like slaves.

  “What kind of things do they want?” Suraya asked. Her voice trembled.

  Pink’s sigh was long and weary. Anything you could think of, really, he said. Theft. Assault. Murder. Imagine being in control of polongs and pelesits, toyols and bajangs and langsuirs. An army of ghosts and monsters. You would be almost unstoppable.

  “But what does he want you for? Doesn’t he have enough?” she said, her voice rising and tinged with frustration. “And you’re bound by blood too. How can he do that? I thought that was the whole point, that you couldn’t belong to anyone else.”

  Power is an addiction. A small taste is often enough for people to crave another, and then another, and then another, and those who have it will do anything to get more of it.

  “And he called himself RELIGIOUS!” She drove her fist into the mattress, pounding it over and over again, punctuating her words with their soft, satisfying thumps. “How can he just USE religion like that? What kind of monster does that?”