The Black Isle (60 page)

Their quiet resentment told me this peace between the worlds would not last. But it was no longer my job to intercede, and I didn’t want to be present to witness the clash.

When I returned from my walk, I booked a one-way ticket to Tokyo, to depart in a few months’ time. It was a move I’d contemplated for years. If I let myself die here, I was condemning myself to become a ghost. This I already knew: I’d never be able to let it go. So why Tokyo? A city that large could swallow me up. I would look invisible, be invisible, and no one, not even
he
, could find me there. Living amidst my wartime foes, I would never engage with anyone; I’d never care. It was the best way I knew to die alone.

Best of all, Tokyo would not be the Black Isle. In exile, I would be free to let my memories shine, blossom like those old sweet wrappers tucked forever in the mulberry bush: the Isle of forty, fifty, sixty years past, a fragrant city drenched for eternity in sweat, smoke, and slouchy, off-tempo cha-cha.

As it happened, my getaway was trickier than I’d hoped. Perhaps the ghosts had glimpsed my itinerary.

It began with rumors. Seven soldiers, healthy boys aged eighteen and nineteen, supposedly vanished during routine training in one of the few remaining jungles, only to be found days later—gruesomely disemboweled and strung up on trees. “Pontianaks!” screamed the tabloids. Naturally, the government crushed such talk. Still, the night the scandal broke, my phone rang—as expected—and my answering machine recorded a message from the prime minister’s office, urging Lady Midnight to call back ASAP.

Lady Midnight did not. Her work was done.

As public panic over the soldiers’ deaths mounted, the city saw another calamity. A brand-new tourist hotel on South Bridge Road, the unfortunately named Hotel New Babylon, collapsed, taking a hundred foreigners. It was a site I’d advised the developer O.W.K. not to build on many years ago, because the spirits from the graves beneath were too many. Sadly, the promise of lucre proved stronger than my words. Again, my phone rang—four separate times, with Kenneth making the fourth call himself. Again, I did not respond.

I was a retired librarian and soon not even an Islander anymore.

On October 31, 1990, my bags were packed. I’d given away most of my things to the survivors of Hotel New Babylon. All that I wanted to keep, including a small ziplock bag of Li’s remains, I stuffed into two medium-sized suitcases that would go on the plane with me. I would buy whatever else I needed in Tokyo.

On my final night, I went to bed on a bare mattress, staring at bare walls. Or at least, I tried very hard to fall asleep. My heart, that sad old thing, was pounding like a child’s on Christmas Eve.

 When the telephone rang, it came almost as a relief. I hadn’t announced my plans to anyone, yet I knew that certain people had it within their power to follow my every move. I was determined to frustrate him, to ignore the rings and let him miss his chance to wish me good-bye.

In the end, though, curiosity got the better of me. It was 12:37 a.m. when I picked up the phone.

The caller was Violet.

“I have to speak to you, in person,” she whispered, her voice distorted by a thickness in her throat—from crying, it sounded like. “Please, Cassandra. You’re the only person I can turn to. Ken…he’s not well.”

“How does that concern me? I’m not his wife. That privilege is yours.”

“I’m begging you.” Desperation made her shrill. “I’ll send a car to your place in five minutes.”

“I’m not going to you.” Not only did I not want to see her, but I also didn’t want to see what they’d done to the house. I had my own memory of the Wee manse sealed away.

“All right, then. We’ll speak in the car. Please, Cassandra. Just a few minutes of your time. I promise you…I will make this worth your while.”

Seven minutes later, a black Jaguar came to a halt outside my apartment building. As the tinted window lowered, revealing Violet in the backseat, I stepped out of the shadows and showed myself.

The driver, a silent Malay, waited for me to buckle up and began driving slowly toward the city. Anyone who saw us through the blackened glass might have thought they were witnessing the setup of some eerie film noir: two grim old biddies journeying into the night.

Violet’s face was puffy from hours, perhaps even days, of distress. She had regained all her old weight plus the accumulated sagging of age. But her directness was the same as ever.

“I
know
about you and him.” To my surprise, her voice held no rancor. “At this point, none of it matters. All that matters is that you’re the one person who can save him. He’s locked himself in his study since this morning, drunk on champagne, refusing to come out. I fear this is it. He’s
given up
.”

She broke into a heaving sob. I couldn’t tell what her words meant—was Kenneth threatening to quit or to kill himself? Either scenario seemed unlikely, for this was a man who had survived far worse.

“He’s never known what it’s like to fail,” she continued, “to have his judgments questioned. Now, with these crises. And with you leaving…”

“Don’t try to pin the blame on me.” I stared out the window. The tinted glass made everything look artificially dark. Was this how Kenneth saw the world?

“I’m not blaming you for anything. There’s no time for blame. We both care about him—that’s why I’ve asked you here. Something else horrible has been happening, something the press has yet to uncover. But it’s only a matter of time.” She took a deep breath. “It’s those underground tunnels, for the new trains. You know we’ve been using a lot of workers from Thailand. Good, hardworking boys from the north. Well, since last week, they’ve been dropping like flies.”

“How many?”

“About thirty so far.”

“Thirty?” The poor things, perishing in foreign earth, far from home.

“But there’s nothing wrong with our safety or engineering,” she added quickly. “The boys just collapsed and went into a kind of coma; those who couldn’t be woken up died within the hour. The three who’ve come forth—the ones who did wake—all talked about winged female demons appearing to them in their sleep. Apsara, you know, those flying things from Eastern mythology.”

I knew them well but said, “Have you ruled out gas leaks?”

“If only. Of course, that’s the first thing the contractors checked, but it’s nothing like that. No, no. It’s nothing that can be explained, not conventionally. Ken thinks it’s supernatural.” She laughed uncomfortably. “But if he says so in public, can you imagine how the world’s going to view him? Honestly, he couldn’t care less what his own wife thinks of him, but the world? That’s his greatest fear, to be taken as a fool.

“As a Catholic, I’m reluctant to believe in any of this myself, but I also know that on the Isle, the rules have always been different. There are too many things here I cannot begin to understand, things that somebody like
you
might know more about.”

“Me?”

“Yes, Lady Midnight.”

The car stopped at the foot of Forbidden Hill, now partially bald and the site of massive construction. Colorful banners on the pedestrian walkway announced,
ANOTHER PROJECT BY THE MASS TRANSIT AUTHORITY. INCONVENIENCE NOW FOR AN ACCELERATED FUTURE!
Behind it were towering plywood scaffolds.

It looked neat and civilized on the outside, but I’d seen how construction was carried out on the Isle—poor foreign workers fed on inadequate food descending into holes wearing inadequate gear. But unlike the dozens of sites around the city that chugged along twenty-four hours a day for the advent of the underground train, here no machinery was rumbling. Work had apparently come to a halt. I tried to see if there was anybody who might give me a hint about what was happening but didn’t see a soul.

“This is where the men perished,” said Violet. “All in one location. We sent the others back to their little villages, paid them enough to be quiet.”

Up at the old cemetery on the side of the Hill, part of which peered from above the pretty scaffolds, the shrubbery was gone, and the tombs had been reduced to rubble. Oh, Kenneth Kee, how cheap your promises…

“Just look at what he’s done,” I said. “Even if
you
don’t believe in—”

Violet cut me off. “The shortest route between Chinatown and city hall was straight through this hill. We had no choice.”

“There’s always a choice. You could have dug around it. No passenger would have noticed the difference of one minute in their journey.”

“Be that as it may,” she went on, suddenly firm, “the tunneling is complete.”

“Then it’s too late. Isn’t it?”

“Maybe not. If it’s true the spirits of the dead have been causing these disruptions, you could find out what they want. Tell us how we can stop more incidents from happening.”

I glanced at my watch: 1:15. I should have been in bed ages ago.

“Cassandra.” She clutched my hands. “I’ll give you a million dollars. Out of my own pocket. That’s all I ask of you—please. You’ll have the money tonight, I promise. Tell me what they want. Or our Ken’s
lost
.”

She mentioned the sum as if it were immaterial, as if I were one of those workers she had so casually paid off.

“Ahmad will take me home,” she said, throwing a nod at the inexpressive driver. “Then he’ll come back here and wait for you. Please. If not for Ken, then for our beleaguered island. It’s
yours
, too, you know.”

The truth was I
did
know.

I slipped through a crack in the plywood scaffold—one of the few advantages of being skinny as a twig. At sixty-eight, I was far from spry but could always stretch myself out if ever I had to outsmart a barrier. I was never any good at respecting boundaries.

Lying before me, glazed pale blue by the moonlight, was an enormous crater at least two stories deep—the site of the future underground station. Pylons, cinder blocks, and metal webbing peered curiously out of the mud, alongside an extended family of digging equipment, their yellow scooping arms frozen in midthrust. At the hill’s base, I spotted the entrance to a tunnel—
the
tunnel—its dirt ceiling and sides propped up by wood trusses in the manner of a mine shaft. Light flickered from within, the only hint of movement in this vast nocturnal still life.

I looked up the denuded hillside and jumped back in fear. I was being watched—not by dead workers but by thirty people in garb from decades and centuries past, the permanent residents of Forbidden Hill. They stood motionless, like a macabre display at a wax museum. Their eyes shone with hatred.

A breeze ruffled my hair and I felt myself go as rigid as the bulldozers in the crater. I’d never had ghosts direct such furious looks at me, their friend and advocate. If they decided to attack, I was finished. What a sad, misunderstood end it would be, too—dying, it seemed, while on patriotic service to the prime minister.

How could I have taken Violet’s bait? The ghost world was no longer my domain. I was old, out of practice, outnumbered. I was a
librarian
, for God’s sake. Instead of standing here, fighting the unknown on behalf of a man who was no longer my lover or even my friend, I should have been savoring one final night in my apartment, luxuriating in old memories or nursing a giant mug of Ovaltine. Not this.

I cursed Violet’s tears and my own vanity, although guilt, too, surely had a hand.

No matter—it was too late to slink away.

A dark silhouette appeared at the mouth of the tunnel. It was a small boy, not menacing like the others. He gave me a friendly wave. I knew the ghosts had chosen such an emissary to put me at ease, to disarm me.

I waved back and suddenly felt as if he and I were about to resume a conversation we’d begun not long ago. On a topic I knew well.

The boy beckoned for me to follow him into the tunnel. For a second I hesitated. Then I walked to the edge of the crater, glancing at the static sprawl of machinery below and the watchful wax gallery above. The whole universe had apparently stopped to enable this moment—my communion, after a long hiatus, with the dead. The ghost world was requesting my return.

For better or worse, I entered its womb.

Crunch, crunch
. The loose gravel underfoot advertised my arrival.

The boy vanished. Before me lay a path lit with bulbs from a bygone era, their carbon filaments glowing and hissing as I neared, fading away as I passed, like bewitched tapers. These fixtures were soldered to the walls, their wiring so antiquated I wondered if I was imagining the whole thing. Who would possibly use such lighting at the end of the twentieth century?

I got my answer soon enough. The glaring figures on the hill had been only a preview. The tunnel widened into a grotto, and there, gathered in the dank, stood my real audience—hundreds of men and women, like some secret society of the dead, reeking of the upturned grave. The boy guide was among them, standing at the fore, and I finally caught a glimpse of his face—or what was left of it. The flesh had been eaten away by maggots, and in place of his nose was a hollow oozing slime. He had no eyes.

My knees went soft.

The others were just like him—bony, ravaged, decomposed, what all human beings look like after their time on earth was done. I’d never seen so many gathered in one place, with all their attention focused on one thing: me.

What did they want from me? Pity? Revenge? I wasn’t about to stay long enough to find out.

I turned to leave, but more of the dead materialized, their movements stiff and jagged, closing me off from the way I had come. I suddenly thought of the Minotaur in his maze and wished I’d brought my own ball of string. I wasn’t ready to die yet, not here, not when my escape from the Isle had been so close. So damn close.

“Forgive me,” I whispered. “Forgive us.”

My words reverberated through the cave as if I’d shouted. Every step I took produced an inordinately loud crunch.

Faces emerged, distinct, in the flickering light only to melt back into the darkness once more. Malays, Chinese, Parsees, South Indians, Eurasians, Anglo-Saxons, Jews…every one devastated by the elements, devoured by time. Every one missing eyes.