The Black Isle (15 page)

“Robin!” I snatched the fork from his unsteady hands. “It’s me, you fool!”

His eyes widened as recognition flowed in. “Why, you’re as wet as a dog.”

“Has anyone tried to break in?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” he said blankly.

The army should have been grateful to be spared of such a specimen. I slammed the door and locked it, tipping a chair against it as an added precaution.

“By the way,” he said with a wink, “your brother’s here.”

Li was in the sitting room—and he wasn’t alone. A comely Malay woman was perched next to him, drying her hair with a towel.
My
towel. Hatred shot through me. I was out in the storm on my own while he sat here, dry as a bone, playing hero to his Milkmaid paramour!

“To hell with you, Li!”

“What?” he said, acting innocent, enraging me further.

I tore off my ruined shoes and stormed to my room to undress, trailing prints of mud behind me.

Li ran along and grabbed my arm. “Are you all right? I was so worried.”

“Then why are you sitting at home with your damned whore?”

“You told me to wait here! Anyway, I don’t even know that girl. She begged us to let her in. Her name’s Anim.”

Anim? I dipped back to peer at her. He was telling the truth. This wasn’t Zana. She was just another pretty Milkmaid, probably from his lobe. Doubtless his next conquest. Her skin was fair, silky—she didn’t look like the type who did manual labor at all.

“She’s really scared,” Li went on. “You see, she’s pregnant. And everyone around her was hysterical about the pontina.”

“Pontianak—don’t you know anything?”

He followed me to my room. I made him wait outside while I changed.

“Mina’s father is dead,” I said through the door. “Those savages murdered him.”

No response. I opened the door and took a good look at Li’s sullen face.

He snapped back, “Oh, stop acting like such a saint. You wanted him dead, too.”

True then; not true now. I turned away before he could see my lips quivering. “Where the hell’s Father anyway?”

“Still in Ulu Pandan, I suspect. Drinking.”

No tears, not now. “Once this is over, I don’t care what he says, I’m leaving.”

“Where to?”

“I don’t know. I’m tired of being ignorant. I want to learn things. I want to go back to school.” That last part sounded like an unimaginable luxury.

Li squeezed my hand—a surprising gesture of solidarity. “Take me with you.”

I knew this was his way of apologizing, for having wished me gone.

“You have your own two feet. I’m not carrying you on my back like a sack of potatoes.”

He smiled. We both smiled. But I knew that what I needed to get away from included him. He was part of the history I had to flee.

There was a loud crash in the sitting room, followed by an extravagant groan from Robin. The man had fallen down drunk, no doubt. I rolled my eyes and we both relaxed, rescued just in time from discussing the future.

“I’m not helping him up,” I said to Li. “I’m not touching that swine.”

“I’m not touching him either.”

We went to assess the damage.

Robin lay on the floor, whimpering gibberish, a strange look of stupor on his face as he stared up at the ceiling. The Milkmaid had her back to us. She was kneeling over him, trying to help. The end table was overturned, its legs in pieces. The fat oaf must have shattered it with his fall.

“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.