The Black Isle (48 page)

“My friends, your eternal home will be in jeopardy if the British remain. They plan to flatten Forbidden Hill to make way for a hotel. In exchange for your help, I promise that you will have a permanent home here on Forbidden Hill. I’ll make sure you will
never
be disrupted from your rest.”

As I explained their side of the bargain, my army stood listening, their eyes blank, uninspired. Did they understand what I was asking of them? I looked at Issa, whose face showed only calm.

After the ghosts dispersed, their lips quivering their weird prayers, I could only wait and wonder. But one thing was already clear. Issa had been right. Calling forth the dead nearly killed me.

He had to carry me down Forbidden Hill and put me in a taxi. I wanted nothing more than to take to my bed, which I did—for seven full days and seven nights. I felt as if I’d caught the flu, and indeed the symptoms were similar: fever, migraines, muscle aches, the loss of energy and appetite. But this was no flu—unless it was a flu whose symptoms lasted not just days, but months.

Sadly, out in the world, nothing seemed to have changed.

“Maybe we need to do more,” I told Issa one night when he came to visit.

“You’ve already done more than your share; anything further would be testing fate,” he said. He, too, had been weakened, though far less severely. The chanter always suffered most. “The dead cannot be hurried. The Night of the Burning Trees was a rare exception. The youth of the girls made them impatient. Too much so, in fact.”

But
I
was impatient. It enraged me to think I’d sacrificed my health to no result. I could still see the passive, blank faces of my constituency at Forbidden Hill. Did they feel no obligation, no urgency to protect their own resting ground?

As soon as I recovered the strength to walk the streets on my own, I sought out two smaller resting places—a Taoist mausoleum in Chinatown, packed with the cremated remains of lonesome amahs, and an overgrown field in Little India where Indian convict laborers had been thrown into mass graves. There, without Issa, I chanted again and asked for volunteers in ridding the British.

In the days after, I obsessively followed the news, looking for signs.

The first one came at the Polo Club. One morning, during the Anzac & Friends tournament, horses from both the Island and Kiwi teams began bucking violently for no apparent reason, throwing off all their riders. Island captain Killian Ross lost his helmet and was trampled by his own horse, costing him his right eye. Several other players suffered broken bones. Nobody could explain the accident but it was quickly forgotten—horses were just animals, after all.

Less easy to dismiss were the events a fortnight later. The aptly named Cyril Cunning, the councilman who’d first suggested flattening Forbidden Hill, woke to find his eyes sewn shut with red Taoist thread. His wife began packing for England that same afternoon. The next day, just before lunch, the notoriously awful magistrate Alan Topper was set upon by his paperwork. The sharp edge of a lucrative engineering contract blew toward his eyes, slicing open his lenses. He ran from his office, blood streaming down his face as he screamed, “I can’t see!”

The eyes. I had to smile. The ghosts were targeting the colonials’ blind spots.

Two weeks later, yet more mischief. In an overgrown training area not far from the polo fields, night sentries reported seeing bare-skinned Tamils roaming the grounds. When ordered to stop, they simply vanished. When fired upon, bullets seemed to pass through their bodies. Entire squadrons of Gurkhas, bold warriors who had served as peacekeepers during India’s bloody partition, resigned, fearing for their lives.

After this came a long and desolate lull. Months went by with nothing out of the ordinary being recorded. I feared that, like me, the dead had worn themselves out.

Then one afternoon, I took a trip to the newly opened Van Kleef Aquarium, a large modernist cube not far from city hall. I was feeling depressed, hobbling around on a cane at the age of twenty-nine and unable to concentrate on a book for more than minutes at a stretch. I ruined my health, and still the Brits were hanging on.

As luck would have it, I’d picked the worst possible day to visit. It was May 24, Empire Day. Schoolchildren had the day off and the building was packed with a fleet of pint-sized, fair-haired delegates in the sickly green uniforms of the British Council kindergarten. Because of this group, the ticket seller had closed off the place to all other visitors but me—perhaps she felt sorry for the poor limping creature that I was.

Squeezed into the lightless, tank-lined passageways with a hundred children, I told myself I could shoo away the rowdy ones with a firm tap of my cane, but such measures proved unnecessary. They walked hand in hand, twenty charges in lockstep with each teacher, everyone sporting a paper crown to honor Queen Victoria’s birthday. Tunnel after darkened tunnel, the tiny monarchs traipsed in a hushed, bug-eyed state of wonder—impressively, not one of them sniveled. At their age, I would have been scared stiff by the expressionless orbs flitting and flying across the violet windows.

Finally, after eyeing these exhibits of modest anemones, sea stars, and unflappable fish—all locally caught, the signs proclaimed—we came to the hall containing the Van Kleef’s pièce de résistance: the Great Blue Yonder. The tank, the grandest in the Orient, was a glass chamber two stories high in which swam an undersea menagerie culled from far-off waters—coral, moray eels, and octopuses from the mid-Pacific, and four Australian great white sharks, each the size of a canoe.

Yelping in excitement, the children pushed ahead of me until I stood waist-deep in a sea of little crowned heads. They pressed their faces against the glass, even as their teachers warned them to stand back. But it was hard to fault their curiosity—this blue room was amazing. It pulled us all to the bottom of a fictional, harmonious ocean where sharks and octopuses were the best of friends.

The beasts, however, were unnaturally still. They seemed to have been hypnotized. The sharks floated in suspended motion instead of firing ahead, as they are wont to do. Only their gills shuddered.

The children were transfixed. Here were harmless sharks and spongy octopod arms that would give you a nice hug. They bustled by me to push closer to the glass, seeking authentication: Were these puppets or the real things?

I gave way to the anxious cohort, moving to the back of the hall. This was when I noticed the black nests of kelp in the tank beginning to move. They rose from behind the sharks like sentient weeds. As they swam toward the glass, I grasped that these were no fugitive plants, nor even fish, but the undulating Rapunzel locks of two creatures that had no business being there.

The ghostly pair showed themselves to be lithe, demonic maenads, all flowing black hair and naked flesh. They had the white eyes of the blind. But they could swim, and very well indeed, producing hoops of air bubbles around the somnambulistic sharks.

Now the madness began.

The two maenads grew rigid and torpedoed toward the glass. They banged their heads against the transparent wall, with a dull, sickening
thump
. Instinctively I looked to the exit. But no one else reacted. Hadn’t they heard it?

“Keep away from the tank!” I shouted to the children.

A curly haired boy turned back to look at me, quizzical, but my cry only inflamed his friends’ curiosity. They crowded in still closer to the glass.

The maenads swept back for a second, as if put off by all the small faces. Then, with a swift flap of their gray arms, they pitched themselves forth and again struck their heads on the glass.
Thump!
This time, the impact was loud enough to make the children jolt back. But none of them knew what to make of it. The curly haired boy walked toward me, throwing frightened glances at the tank.

“Tell the children to move away!” I cried to a nearby teacher, who seemed mesmerized by the static sharks. She didn’t move. “Hurry, children!” I led by example, grabbing the hand of the curly haired boy and pushing toward the exit. “Come with me, everyone! This way!”

The maenads stepped up their attack. They rammed their heads at the glass once more, this time producing the recognizable crunch of breaking glass.

I didn’t hear the glass shatter—it was drowned out by rushing water and shrieking children. The gargantuan tank tore across the center like a cellophane screen. Water rushed in to fill every pocket on the floor in one continuous wave. Even at the exit, water washed up my shins. Fish and glass followed in a violent whoosh. Behind me, the great hall had turned into a lake, the cold water swallowing up children too stricken to run. My God, they might drown!

What happened was even worse. Freed of the tank, the sharks sprang out of their coma. Each white beast splashed its way to a child and greedily flexed its jaws. But this wasn’t just hunger—it was mania driven by plenitude. Blood squirted from the soft bodies as the frenzied sharks ate their way around the hall, sampling the arm of one, the leg of another, spitting out a chunk when they saw something better, juicier. The water churned, a frothing fountain of reds and pinks. No doubt the eels and octopuses would divide up the rest.

All this happened in seconds. The shock giving me new strength, I forced open the emergency exit—sounding the alarm bell—carrying the curly haired boy with me. Immediately a torrent of water gushed out with us. As the red river drained, I set my shivering ward back on solid ground.

“You’re a brave one,” I told him.

I turned back and saw the maenads standing in the empty tank. Their grins told me everything. This was the high price exacted by delinquent ghouls—the ones who, like me, didn’t always abide by the rules.

The aquarium nearly finished me off. Although it sounds melodramatic to say it, I was never the same again. It was one thing to read about nefarious men getting their due and quite another to watch children being savaged before my eyes. Morphine barely lessened the nightmares that followed; it only kept me asleep longer, replaying the horrific scene again and again. I couldn’t leave the rooming house for weeks.

“Never let me have
anything
to do with the spirit world again,” I begged Issa. “I’d rather die than cause injury to another child.”

To my astonishment, Issa remained calm. Too calm.

“All riots burn themselves out,” he said. “Once they’re sated, the spirits will eventually return to their graves, even the unruly ones. We have to look at it this way. At least none of the children were killed.”

“They’ll be scarred for life!”

“Blame yourself if you like. But we can’t win every battle, Cassandra. Let’s just be content with winning one.”

He was right—about that battle. As much as the government-run
Tribune
tried to play it down, evidence of the exodus was everywhere. Taxicabs cruised along High Street empty. Both the Balmoral and the Metropole hired Chinese and Indian touts to solicit local custom for their restaurants and bars. One Monday night, Fitzpatricks, the hundred-year-old grocery that had fed generations of homesick Brits, shuttered its doors for good.

Change came officially, many months later. The civil service was forced to make up the loss of British personnel by taking a drastic measure: non-Europeans were welcome to apply. Naturally, Kenneth was first in line in May 1954.

The night his application was accepted, my energy made a miraculous comeback. After two long years of exhaustion, I felt stirrings of my old self again.

Kenneth and I celebrated in our usual way—in private. He booked a room at the Balmoral, which had opened its hallowed doors to Asiatics, albeit at inflated rates.

“Who did you have to rob to pay for this room?” I asked him when he met me at the entrance.

“Nobody.” Kenneth showed off his watchless wrist. “I’m free at last.”

Much to my surprise, the hotel didn’t come close to living up to my fantasy of it. Its high-ceilinged lobby lounge was airless, even with the electric fans rattling at full speed. The interior was a monotonous study in white, from the Indian porters’ uniforms and the rattan settees to the plastered walls and the marble floors. White might have been de rigueur at the grand seaside hotels of Brighton or Hastings, but it was hardly ideal for the tropics. At the Balmoral, the hallways were patterned with green, yellow, and gray corsages of mildew and rot. Not wanting to burst Kenneth’s bubble—after all, he’d pawned his prized Rolex for this—I kept these observations to myself.

Our room, lucky number thirteen, had a four-poster bed and a balcony overlooking a pleasant courtyard, but the carpet—once white, now verdigris—smelled like a wet dog.

“Now that you’re in,” I said, settling on the bed, “we can’t forget the spirits. They put us in this room, on this bed. We have to make sure Forbidden Hill stays untouched.”

“I’ll do what I can.” Kenneth joined me, and the springs on his side of the mattress began squeaking, as if to discount the solemnity of his vow.

“Seriously, you promise?”

“Yes, yes.” Again the bedsprings squealed.

“Should we ask for another room?”

“If we did that, we’d look like bumpkins. The English live with their discomforts. They
relish
them.”

A bottle of champagne softened all of the room’s flaws. It made them amusing, even educational, as if we’d lifted the veil to an emperor’s chamber only to find it filled with hay. The champagne provided a corrective in other areas as well. That night, Kenneth struck me for the first time as handsome. His swagger had returned. He fastened my wrists to the bedposts with two of his neckties and did what he claimed he’d wanted to do to me on the day we met in the library.

For the first time, I let myself yield to him completely.

“Did you ever come this much with
him
?” he asked as we lay there, still in the glow of the moment.

“Don’t spoil it, Ken.”

“How many times?”

“Stop it.”

In the moonlight, through the open French doors, I studied his future statesman’s jawline and the ambition sparkling in his eyes—ambition every bit as raw as his lust. I kissed the dimple on his cheek that I knew would one day enchant old grandmothers and enjoyed the fighter’s grip that would astonish his enemies when he shook their hands.