The Black Isle (34 page)

“Did she die—of disgust?” I used the bluntest words I could.

“No, no, she’s quite alive. She just… didn’t wish to be with me, that’s all.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Look at me,” he said, his voice suddenly sterner. “Momoko.”

Standing before me, he pushed hard on the backrest of my chair, and it tipped backward, taking me with it. My surroundings did a cartwheel, and the chair landed with a loud crack. I braced myself: This was it. This was the part where he avenged his shattered ego by slicing open my throat.

With quick hands, he pitched the chair out from beneath me and flung it to the side of the room; it clattered across the wood floor and struck the wall. Then he leaned over me, possessive yet not wholly certain of his power, like a tiger surveying his prey.

“Momoko,” he murmured, gazing at me with wretched torment.

Saying her name galvanized something within him. In a second, his hand moved under my skirt. I felt his fingers probing between my thighs.

I struggled, trying to push his face away, but he held me down. It wasn’t just him I had to fight off—the wine had fogged my head, paralyzed my reflexes.

I succumbed.

The next day, I awoke, alone in bed, a little past noon.

It seemed like another universe—calm, free of air-raid sirens and the sounds of gunfire. Had I been freed?

I descended the stairs cautiously, groggy from last night’s drinking. The aroma of soy sauce and sesame oil clung to the air, along with a sickening marine tang. Otherwise, all was clear; it seemed I was alone in the house.

On the dining table sat the evidence of last night’s feast—spent candlesticks, my rice bowl with its crown of oleaginous fish flesh. The chair remained on the floor, turned on its side, against the wall.

Ravenous, I decided to grab myself a bite of rice. As I reached for a spoon, I saw that both eels, sitting in a congealed puddle in the center of the table, were missing their bellies. Their eye sockets played host to colonies of flies.

Just then, a black cat, mangy and yellow-eyed, leapt up from one of the chairs. It began padding around the eels, hissing at me.

“It’s all yours, kitty. All yours.”

The front door beckoned. I burst out of the dank corruption of the house and into the embrace of the outside world. Fresh air ought to save me.

It was blazingly bright outside, the air filled with birdsong and the chirrups of crickets. But the view was terrible. Suspended from the porte cochere were two carcasses—man and dog, except neither was wholly man nor wholly dog. The heads of Mr. Wee and Agnes had been severed at the neck and exchanged. The two bodies were strung horizontally, limbs pulled aloft. Blood pooled on the drive below, the edges already blackening to a crust.

A scream tore loose from my throat.

As he’d done once before, Taro rushed from behind me, scooped me up in his arms, and kicked the front door shut behind us.

“They weren’t meant for your eyes,” he said.

Looking at him, I recalled the kind face of the man I was supposed to marry—my real fiancé, not this impostor, not this murderer.

“Daniel!” I shrieked as loudly as I could, in case he was near and able to hear me, in case he’d been held in the storeroom or the servants’ wing, in case he could still detect the love in my voice.

The back of Lieutenant Colonel Rukumoto’s hand lashed across my face.

I don’t remember the rest.

Weeks passed. Maybe months. I couldn’t tell. The monsoons had arrived sluggishly and washed away just as sluggishly; then the new year had come and gone. I only knew about this passing of time because there had been endless, sticky days with biblical torrents of rain, and there had been firecrackers—then, before long, no more of either.

What concerned me on a daily basis was flesh. My flesh kept me alive. Not my intelligence, not my pluck, not even my ability to see ghosts, which, incidentally, was meaningless in a house where ghosts feared to tread. During the day, Taro kept me locked at home with his silent goons. I was free to spend these hours as I chose, so long as subterfuge and contact with the external world were not involved. And every evening, like an old-fashioned businessman, he returned to me, the house, and his waking dream of middle-class domesticity. I was how he numbed himself; I did for him what ten bottles of sake could never do.

I, in turn, began to look forward to his return, just so I had somebody to talk to. Of course, conversation came with a price of Taro’s asking, and I soon adapted to this barter in skin. Sex became a way for me to crush the hours, to escape from the present and forget, forget, forget. I fled into my body.

It was also how I survived. Every night, the mindless act of removing my clothes bought me—and poor Daniel—another day away from prison or death. Whenever I did not submit as he pleased, my captor brought up Daniel’s name—casually, of course, because all he’d need issue was a casual order and Daniel would be no more. With these tart little reminders, he ensured my compliance. But he wasn’t always a brute. No, he was often startlingly gentle, exemplary even, and on those monthly days I was unavailable to him, he was content to watch me eat, sleep, bathe—in effect, study me as I carried out the ordinary acts of life. He had no interest in my desires, never solicited my opinions; to him, I was a specimen, a pet, a thing.

The more mundane my activity, the more pleasure he derived from it. I learned not to panic when he stole into the bathroom to observe me brushing my teeth as if it were the most enthralling demonstration on earth.

He called me his wife. To the junior officers who frequented the house, I was also unofficially acknowledged as such, although they called me
Okasan
, which meant “Mother.” I was never paraded out in the world or showed off to Taro’s superiors at parties, because as a self-avowed traditional man, he believed that the world of the home and the world of the workplace should never mix. In fact, so convinced of his own dictum was he that I was never let out beyond the courtyard of the house, and even then, not without the supervision of some expressionless uniformed cretin who kept his hand on a pistol.

I consoled myself with the thought that I was experiencing a parallel confinement to Daniel, to Li, to Father, trapped in their respective cells, though there, of course, the similarity ended. Yes, I worked like a slave cleaning the house, but Taro gave me all the creature comforts he could gather during wartime, short of diamonds and foie gras. We had air-conditioning; we ate beef. He plied me with wine and, even better, cognac, chocolate, and books, trying to prove to me that he had a soul. I was not even expected to cook. One of his flunkies, an eighteen-year-old from Kobe whose family had run a tavern, became our chef. My epicurean offerings were required only in the boudoir.

Yet not one day went by without me thinking about Daniel, Li, and Father. I even worried about Kenneth, with his band of merry men in the forest. How could these fighters, mere flesh and blood, do battle with bombs? Of course, as Taro’s “wife,” I knew better than to bring up my fiancé’s name. Already each time I mentioned Father or Li, asking to see them, he met my words with an icy silence, as if I’d uttered something so vile that he couldn’t even bring himself to respond, that with my thoughtlessness I had violated the sacred rules of our union. He would use this as an excuse to get drunk. And when Taro was drunk, he was not a man worth negotiating with. He did not appreciate conversation, and he got very, very rough.

Several times each day, I gazed into mirrors, checking for ghosts. They were never there. I found myself praying for their return—even the spirit of Mr. Wee, who had cause to hate me—so I could glean from them news of the outside world or coax them into frightening my captors. I wanted my allies—my
army
, as Issa had put it.

Oh, Issa. I’d been afraid of the wrong things. The horrors I had witnessed far eclipsed the ghouls of his graveyard. But how could I right my cowardly wrong when I was no longer free to cross the street, let alone find my way back to Forbidden Hill?

An idea popped into my head one morning during my prisoner’s constitutional—that is, my daily laps along the rim of the courtyard. I had the post-rain redness of the roses to thank for this bit of inspiration. They made me think of the gated rose garden in Shanghai and the dead children whose blood, Sister Kwan told us, gave the blooms their glow.

“Of course,” I whispered when the inspired kernel took root.

My two young wardens eyed me cautiously.

“Okasan?” the shorter and softer of them said.

“Stop calling me that, will you? I’m not your bloody mother.”

“But, Okasan…”

I kicked off my slippers and stepped away from the concrete, onto the soggy muck. The soldiers exchanged anxious looks, trying to second-guess my next move. I’d never strayed before, nor had I ever spoken to them.

“What are you doing?” said the taller, sterner boy, hands at his waist.

I leapt onto the most freshly heaped mound of dirt behind the rosebushes, the sure sign of a recent burial. The soil was still springy beneath my feet. “Won’t you join me?”

From their horrified expressions, I knew my instincts had been right—the murdered men lay below. This wasn’t the sacred heart of any cemetery, nor did I know the words to Issa’s chants, but improvisation was better than inaction, and I had nothing to lose. The two boys conferred in quick-fire Japanese as I unbuttoned my blouse.

The sterner one, feeling the strain of Taro’s dictum to not hurt me, spat out his distaste. “Okasan, stay on path! We do not want you to have accident!”

“Accident? You mean, like this?” I flopped myself down on the sickening earth, the mud smearing all over my skirt and shins. I folded my legs as Issa had done and threw my blouse aside.

The sight of me in my brassiere, covered in mud, sent the boys into a panic.

“Okasan, obey!”

Using a twig, I began loosening the clods around me; then I rubbed the muck on my face, neck, arms, and chest. The mineral,
living
smell of the earth and the thought of the bodies beneath me made me want to retch, but I played at harmless high spirits, like a child making mud pies. I had to. “Come and join me!”

I continued in this manner until the humorless martinet stormed away, presumably to telephone Taro, leaving his comrade to watch over me.

“Please, Okasan,” the nicer boy begged. “You must stop. Isamu-san says he wants to shoot you with gun.”

My stomach turned but I continued to smile.

“We are forbidden to touch you, Okasan.” He kept a safe distance on the edge of the concrete, as if the plant bed were molten lava. “We only watch you. For safety.”

I closed my eyes and tuned out the world. I had to act fast, even if it was unlikely that Isamu would shoot his superior’s wife for mere horseplay. I grabbed the twig in both hands and began rowing. Left, right, left, right—just as I had rowed on the grave of Issa’s father. I realized the precise elements were lacking, but I had to try, just as I’d improvised on the plantation and then again with the ghost of the first Mrs. Wee. No longer could I witness this war as a passive bystander.

It was time to round up my ghosts.

“Forgive me,” I whispered to the bodies below.

Not knowing Issa’s Arabic chants, I called upon prayers from every cobwebbed crevice of my girlhood, murmuring and repeating this motley catechism with the hope that they would cede their customary meaning and take on the watery lingo of trance. This was harder to achieve than I’d supposed because, aside from me not being in the silent heart of a cemetery, my guard was continually barking, his voice warped with rising panic.

“No, Okasan! Please stop…”

I blocked him out.

Left, right. Left, right. Amitabha, Amitabha. Om, om, om. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Left, right. Left, right. Left, right. Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar…

I rowed and I rowed, faster and faster. I chanted and chanted, faster and faster, pressing my eyelids shut, blocking out the world. I had only mere minutes before Isamu returned.

I concentrated. I thought of the murdered men beneath me, savoring their outrage, their shock, their fear. I knew I could feel their pain like no other living girl could.

Left, right, left, right, left, right…

Sooner than I expected, the earth began to tremble. Or was it waves? The sea?

I opened my eyes.

“Okasan!” The boy soldier was still rooted to his spot, staring at me with terror. His hands stretched out before him, ordering me either to calm down or to stay away from him. The tremors continued in the earth, but where was the water? Where was the badi?

I tried to stand but slipped on the damp earth and fell back on my rump. My legs were soft, weak, and wracked with pins and needles. Heat was rising through the topsoil, the steam becoming visible in streams.

Something was happening.

Mere yards before me, fingers and then a hand reached out of the muck, the nails blackened by death, the flesh gray. The sight repulsed me but I was also thrilled: My summoning had actually worked.

Now more fingers and a second hand. The matching pair, finding their grip on the surface of the earth, flexed, consolidating their power. Two hands are better than one. With a muscular push, the ghoul’s head and shoulders emerged.

But this was no dead man. This was the slick black head of Agnes—atop Mr. Wee’s torso.

I screamed. I was witnessing an unholy birth—disgusting and exhilarating at the same time. Could it be that Agnes was my badi?

The monster slowly pulled itself out of the soil and stood on all fours, its clothes filthy with worms, moss, and amniotic mud. As it became aware of the sunlight and the air of the living world, it peeled open its fur-lined obsidian eyes to examine me. No animus, but no recognition either.

The mouth of the beast opened wide, wider than was possible for any living beast. Its teeth were not canine but human, blunt and square and lined with brown mucus. Its tongue glistened black.