The Black Isle (61 page)

One face in the middle of the crowd burned into the light—and stayed. It was a Chinese woman, her gray skull exposed through a scrim of long, white hair. I recognized her jade-green cheongsam; she wore no pearls, however—the undertakers doubtless stole them because she had no children to complain.

“Mrs. Odell!” I cried, my voice quavering.

She stepped aside. Standing behind her was a skeleton in a gray suit. His head hung limply on his shoulder—Mr. Odell, of course. Although their appearance frightened me, I knew they would do me no harm. I’d paid for her burial; I’d ensured their reunion.

But without eyes, could they even recognize me?

“Help me, please!”

The stench of rotting flesh flooded my nose and mouth as if liquid, and I forced back the urge to gag—it would only reveal my fear, my revulsion, my mortality. The Odells didn’t come forward. There was no choice; I had to wade through the others to reach them.

I kept my eyes low. The light, thankfully, was dim and erratic. Pushing through this gathering of corpses, the ground crunching beneath my feet, I told myself to think of the place as an abandoned butchery. The slabs were extruding the juices of putrefaction, yes, but like flesh and bone, decay was the stuff of life and nothing to be afraid of.

Nevertheless, the hairs on my arms prickled. My knees grew weaker with each step. I felt as if everyone in the cave was holding their breath—if they had any breath left to hold—waiting for me to be completely enclosed in their midst so they might crush me and claim me as their own.

The end would be painful; this much I knew. They had cause. I would be punished. I would be made to suffer. But my dying would be nothing compared to my death. I’d be condemned to walk the earth
as one of them
.

The ghost-hunter becoming a ghost. The archness of the irony.

“Mr. Odell,” I pleaded as I staggered on, eyes still on the ground.

As the light shifted, I discovered that the dreadful crunching underfoot came not from loose gravel. I was stepping on fragments of bone, rosaries, coffin shards, black clumps of human hair. A shiver rushed up my leg as I lifted my left foot and saw a set of teeth. Beneath my right foot was a large chip from someone’s headstone, its dedication in Farsi. Every step I took was another desecration. The entire tunnel was filled with lost memories, all of them mixed and mashed. Soon, trains would rumble through here, turning this final resting ground into a crossroads, a spot of perpetual transit.

If the ghosts took me, I, too, would be absorbed into this anonymous jumble. It would be as if I’d never lived…

Calm down
, I warned myself. Panic only ensured I
would
become a ghost.

Calm down. Go to the Odells.

But there was no happy reunion when I reached Odell and his wife. The two pushed their cold, hard bodies toward me. They didn’t stop at an embrace. No, they wanted more. They began squeezing me, Odell from the front, his wife from behind. Perhaps to be born into death, both parents were required, as in life.

I shut my eyes and took a deep breath. The reek by now had ceased to register as mere smell. The air had grown so heavy it was becoming impossible to inhale.

Yet I had to try pleading once more. “I can do more for you alive than dead.”

Even as I spoke those words, my desire to live was slipping away. I was exhausted, nauseated, my lungs empty. Terror was being overtaken by the dull ache of resignation. Why fight? Wasn’t I already old and wrecked?

I stopped struggling, but my death parents went on squeezing me tighter and tighter. I felt the cracking of bones, though I couldn’t tell if they were theirs or mine. The three of us were now so enjoined, so complete. It took me by surprise, my readiness to submit—to sleep, to suffocation. I no longer cared if the world forgot me. I was in my parents’ arms. This family of death was more than enough for me. Their misery was all-consuming, deeper and more relentless than any I’d known—because it never had to end.

It was a greedy grief. All I had to do was yield. Completely.

But somewhere in the muddy labyrinth of my mind, I thought of the pontianak, the war, the girls on Blood Hill…I’d survived worse monsters. Why surrender now?

And in that moment, an annoying buzz began nipping at my ear. It wasn’t quite a voice, but the shadow of a voice, like the shushing I’d heard at the cemetery years ago. Only now I could understand it. A language whose meaning suddenly washed clear.

Look around
, Odell beseeched.
Look what you’ve done
.

Not me
, I wanted to protest. But I had no voice to speak with.

Other whispers began, in a myriad of tongues so soft and tangled they sounded like wind blowing through the undergrowth.

You promised us this would never happen
.
You promised us we could rest.

Then two words exploded through the grotto, in the coldest crackle:

Kenneth Kee
.

With that, my death parents released me back into the living. Air rushed into my lungs and I dropped to the ground, wheezing and gagging.

They had believed what I’d told them. I would be more useful alive than dead.

Violet’s driver took me home for a change of clothes and then on to the prime minister’s home. When he dropped me at their door, he whispered, “Good luck.”

Even in the night, the old Wee house glowed. Kenneth had maintained Mr. Wee’s all-white palette, except the prime minister’s paint shimmered, a brighter, whiter white.

Violet had been watching from the window. She opened the front door before I could even ring the bell. The foyer was a startling sight—done up, to match the exterior, in antiseptic white. The servants had been dismissed, which was just as well. I was in no mood for tea or even cognac.

A large childhood portrait of Violet in a short blue dress hung along the staircase, the only thing adorning the bare walls. I hadn’t remembered it from the old days, though the prepubescent scowl was certainly true to life.

“My daughter,” Violet said quickly, nodding at the painting. “She’s all grown up now. But this is how we prefer to remember her.” She clutched my arm to secure my fullest attention. “So, what did you find out?”

“Let me speak to Kenneth.”

Violet glared at me with her old stubborn hostility.

“Believe me, Vi, seeing him is the last thing I want to do, but the spirits have given me no choice.”

“Tell me what they want, and I’ll relay it to him.”

“This is something I have to tell him in person. It involves what he and I did before you came into the picture.”

Her stony mien crumbled. “Years ago, I asked you, I
begged
you, to stop hounding us—”

“Vi,
you
asked me here tonight.”

Gripping the side of the staircase for support, she unleashed a banshee wail. If Kenneth had cared a whit about her, he would have come running. But from the barren halls of the house came not a sound.

“Why can’t you…Why don’t you just make them
go away
?”

“Because I didn’t summon them. He did.”

For his study, Kenneth had chosen the old library, where I’d stumbled into him while seeking refuge from my own engagement party. We were so young then. At that first meeting, the possibility of anything between us was absurd. What we shared then, aside from a mutual distaste for Violet, was a mutual mistrust. Now, all these years later, we had come full circle.  

Violet knocked on the door.

“Ken!”

The door unlocked with a sharp click but remained shut.

“Ju
sh
t Cas
sh
andra,” said Kenneth, his voice ravaged.

“Ken!” Violet repeated, trying to force the door open with her shoulder.

But Kenneth had placed his weight against it. It refused to budge.

“No!” he howled, angrily this time. “I
said
,
jusht
her.”

The second I stepped into the room, he slammed the door in Violet’s face and locked it.

I heard her muffled whimper, followed by some indistinct curse hurled at him or me, most likely both of us.

The air conditioner wheezed and rumbled, even though, at three in the morning, it was quite cool outside. For a man who once claimed to hate air-conditioning, he’d clearly succumbed to its appeal as a buffer, sealing himself off in his own climate.

“Plea
sh
e,” he said, gesturing for me to sit.

Before I could properly situate myself, Kenneth retreated to the swivel chair behind his rosewood desk, no doubt worried I’d say something cruel about the stink of alcohol that surrounded him like a mist—or about how his lisp had returned. The stark white walls didn’t do his complexion any favors, nor did his drab gray shirt and pants. He was startlingly gaunt, with purplish bags under his eyes, but I knew his pallor didn’t just come from the lack of sun and sleep. It took more substantial blows for a man of such hubris to look this bad. This wasn’t the vigorous leader from news photos or TV. This was an old man.

I examined the room. His desk faced outward, bank manager style, ready to receive clients in a pair of leather armchairs that looked like they’d never been sat in—until now. Mr. Wee’s mahogany bookcases had been ripped out, no surprise. They were replaced by an industrial trolley, the kind used to ferry books around libraries, and on it sat atlases, dictionaries, and the
CIA World Factbook
, all in their latest editions.

“Lady Midnight.” He waved for my attention. His nails were slate gray and chewed to the quick. “Well, i
sh
he here, li
sh
ening?”

“Who?”

“Daniel, of course.”

I shook my head, appalled. But my answer seemed to relax him. His eyes grew keener.

“So, tell me,” he began again, his lisp miraculously cured. “How did I get myself into this fix?”

He waited a second, gauging my reaction, then reached behind his desk, theatrically pulling up two fresh champagne flutes from a hidden drawer. His hands were steady; despite his act, and what his wife believed, he was completely sober. Ignoring my objections, he raised a sweating, quarter-full bottle of Dom Pérignon from an unseen ice bucket and filled our glasses to the brim. The final few sips in the bottle he poured straight down his throat.

“I am drinking, yes, but I am not drunk.” He smiled. “You’ll have to pardon my histrionics. It was the only way I could get Vi to go and get you.”

I felt a shiver of rage. “And you knew Vi was the only person who could get me to come. Because the situation had to be damn serious for her to go begging her old foe.”

“Clever girl.”

Clinking his glass to mine, he spilled a few drops of champagne on his polished tabletop. He mopped it up with his sleeve. I pushed my flute away, rejecting both his drink and his theater.

“But you did come,” he said, impressed with himself. “Funny how it always takes a catastrophe to bring us together. First the war, then the emergency, now this.”

I glared at him, hoping to make him abandon his glass.

“Oh, don’t worry. I get these bottles by the bateau. The French ambassador says I’m very easy to please—and I am, but only with the right vintage.” He gargled his drink, then gulped it. “You are not amused. Well, I suppose there’s nothing really amusing about me anymore, is there? I’m no longer the omniscient Papa, what with the chaos, forces out there, beyond my control.”

“You don’t get to absolve yourself so easily. It
was
in your control, all of it. Those are people’s graves you’re destroying.”

“Tough love.” He smirked. “Always with the tough love. Glad I never tried to tame you or I might be missing a hand or foot by now. Or God forbid, worse…”

“We promised them, Ken.”

“No, no, no.
You
promised them. I said I’d
try
. My loyalties lie with the
living
citizens of the Black Isle. Always have. Don’t you understand? I don’t
see
them. It’s not that they’re not real to me, only that they’re…abstract.”

He gulped down the rest of his drink.

“When you’re lucky enough to be prime minister, you have a cabinet of capable men and women who take care of problems for you. Under my guidance, they make their careful calculations, weighing the pros and cons of every move, and then we enact an agreed-upon plan—problem solved, like magic. You see, that’s
my
kind of sorcery. I have people so I don’t have to deal with people, keeping my citizens abstract to me and me abstract to them—thus the illusion of mastery. The trouble is,” he chuckled, “when the problem
begins
as an abstraction, I don’t have anyone who knows how to handle that. Once upon a time, I did, of course, and she was fairly good at her job. Sadly, like all the best minds, she was impossible to keep. You wouldn’t happen to know a replacement, would you?”

“I’m leaving the Isle tomorrow. Nothing you can say or do will change my mind. I’m done with ghosts, I’m done with the bloody Island, and I’m done with you.” I said all of this matter-of-factly so he wouldn’t think I was trying to outdo his melodrama. “This is my final piece of advice. The ghosts want you to see Forbidden Hill for yourself. They want you to understand what you’ve done to them.”

“They want me, do they?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, everyone seems to want me—but you.”

“Self-pity was never your best mode, Prime Minister.”

He grew quiet, withdrawing into himself, as he always did when working through a problem. My defenses went up. He may have been old and beaten down, but this was still Kenneth Kee.

“And after I go and
visit
them, do you think they’ll leave us alone, let the Isle go back to the way it was?”

“I honestly don’t know. But it would be a start.”

He nodded again, in private contemplation.

I stood up. I’d made my case, seen the house, met the man, felt the panic. My assignment was complete.

“Wait. Please.” His voice was soft. “You and I really should…We have to talk about the past. I mean, we should have done that, before tonight. In a less antic atmosphere. We should have gone about things differently—very differently.”