Haunted Legends (5 page)

The nurse stopped me. “No, she’s in a state.”

The old lady’s eyes were reddened and dry. I stared into them, looking for a sign of life, but nothing. There was no pulse. No breath. I remembered
nothing of my first-aid training and didn’t want to put my mouth on her anyway.

“We must lay her flat,” I said. I could do that much. The others watched me.

“You should leave her comfortable,” Sangeeta said, shaking her head. She smelled of burnt hair.

“We must call the doctor,” I said, but even as I spoke I was thinking, “Prussian Blue. If I mix Prussian Blue with Titanium White, water it down, I’ll get her dead eyes. I’ll paint an image of her as a young girl in there, then wipe it away and paint the blank.”

“She’s empty,” the nurse whispered to me. “Her ghost is taking a holiday. She will be back. Just wait.”

Five minutes passed and I knew I had to take charge. I called for the doctor on my cell phone. He said, “No hurry. The nurses will call for the morgue when they are ready.”

I squatted beside Malvika. I wouldn’t get this chance again. The hair on her chin; it didn’t curl.

And it happened. After ten minutes, maybe fifteen, Malvika began to twitch, blink her eyes, then she curled over into a ball and rocked.

“She—Has a doctor examined her?”

“They are not interested.”

“How often does this happen?”

“Sometimes. It rests her. She is happier for days afterward.”

No one else seemed concerned and I wondered if it was my Western woman ways that made me so terrified of an old woman who could die and come back to life as if she was merely sleeping.

I sat quietly and sketched their nighttime routine. That calmed me. Malvika sat up, demanding sugar. Yellowish saliva trails covered her chin. Her lips were dry and cracked. Her eyes were still out of focus and almost purple, it seemed to me. Her left cheek was reddened, as if the blood had already started pooling there.

I sketched those marks of death.

•  •  •

I didn’t go back to St. Martin’s for a while. I was offered a commission from a wealthy Frenchwoman and the lure of the money, plus the idea of having my work hang in France, convinced me to take it.

One afternoon, feeling frustrated with the pretty Frenchwoman’s face, I pulled out my portrait of Malvika. It made me feel ill to look at it. I had not painted a dead woman before. In the background I had painted a clock, set at 5:37.

I thought of the taxi drivers and how easily they repeated the legend of the disappearing girl. How happily they unconsciously supported their rapist companion. I knew that I would not be able to finish my portrait of Malvika until I knew her as a young girl, traced her steps over and over again.

I began then a week, or was it two? Of catching taxis just after five, outside the handicraft center. I did it a dozen times, maybe more. Some of them told me proudly, “A lot of drivers won’t pick up young girls from there. But I don’t believe in ghosts.”

One evening, the driver said, “You been shopping?” His eyes looked at me in the mirror but not at me. Beside me. I’ve always found cross-eyed people hard to talk to.

“Yes,” I said, though I had no bags.

“You girls going dancing tonight?”

“Girls?”

“You and your friend.” He nodded at me. Beside me.

I felt prickles down my right arm, as if someone had leaned close to me. I didn’t believe there was anyone there, but I didn’t want to look. I shifted nearer to the door, and turned my head.

Nothing. No one.

The driver said something in Hindi.

“I’m sorry, I don’t speak Hindi,” I said, but he spoke more, pausing now and then as you would in a conversation.

“Your friend is very shy,” he said.

We turned up the road to the cemetery, heading for St. Martin’s. I had to continue, my heart beat with it. We passed the cemetery, pulled into St. Martin’s. The driver turned around.

“Where . . . is . . . your friend?” he shouted. He didn’t look like a man who shouted. “Where is she? You pay me.”

“Will you wait? I just want to see something.”

He shook his head, already driving away as I shut the door. “Where is she? Where is that girl?”

•  •  •

Malvika sucked her fingers at me. “Sugar? Sugar?”

No one had cleaned her up and I could see the marks of death clearly, the yellowish saliva on her chin, the purple color of her eyes. “Have you been away? Out?” I said.

She nodded. “I am that girl,” and she smiled at me.

•  •  •

I finished my portrait of Malvika. The paint is very thick because I painted her over and over again; young, old, dead. Young, old, dead. I could never decide which face captured her best.

Afterword

The legend on which I based my story is a simple one. A young girl hails a cab in Suva City and asks to be taken to the cemetery. When they reach her destination, she is gone. Taxi drivers tell this story to their passengers at night, to frighten them.

I chose this urban legend because, of all the stories I was told in a year of searching, this is one of only two shared ghost tales I heard. Most were very specific—this person haunting that village, and each teller had their own ghost story to tell.

The cemetery really is across the road from the psychiatric hospital, which exists as I describe it. Around the corner is the prison, which will likely figure in a future story.

My house looks over this cemetery. When I first moved in, I used to tell taxi drivers, “The house near the cemetery.” I realized this frightened them; they checked their mirrors all the time, making the road even more dangerous than it usually is.

Kit Reed’s most recent novel,
Enclave,
was published in 2009. Other recent novels by her are
The Baby Merchant, Dogs of Truth,
and
Thinner Than Thou.
Her short novel
Little Sisters of the Apocalypse
and the collection
Weird Women, Wired Women
were both finalists for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award.

Her short fiction has been published in various anthologies and magazines, including
Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Yale Review, Postscripts,
and
The Kenyon Review.
Her next short story collection,
What Wolves Know,
will be published in 2011.

India is hard, even when it’s your dream destination. Sara’s mouth is dry and her lips are cracked; red dust blows around her ankles. She’s never been so thirsty. For their tenth anniversary, Terry has picked her up and set her down on a ridge in the Rajasthani Desert.

“This is it,” he says in a voice she does not recognize. “Akbar’s ghost city.”

Above them, the massive gate to the red sandstone fortress rises. Shaken, she whispers, “Who died?”

“I guess you could say the city did,” he says, but his voice is charged with hope. “Fatehpur Sikri. Aren’t you excited?”

“I think so. It’s just so
different
.” They’ve talked about this trip for years but now that they’re here, she is unaccountably edgy.

“Isn’t it great?” He takes her hands, waiting for her to be happy.

“Jet lag. That train. I’m not myself right now.”

“India changes people,” Terry says without explaining. “Come on, you’ll be fine.”

“I’m trying!” She loves Terry Kendall, but she can’t shake the idea that he has brought her here for a reason.

•  •  •

Things have been strange between them ever since they reached the subcontinent. Sara can’t for the life of her say what’s changed, only that in this altered world where the quarter-moon hangs upside down, nothing is certain.

With people everywhere she looks and in places she never thought to look, nothing is private.

They fought their way through throngs in the airport and escaped in the closed car Terry had arranged for them, where Sara fell back, grateful for the glass that separated her from multitudes wanting God knows what from them, from the untold numbers living in overgrown lean-tos and huts lining the road into the city.

Their first night in Bombay was glorious. They slept through the day and ate superb Indian food in a rooftop restaurant high above the glittering harbor. At sunset they looked out through plate glass, watching as the shifting light played on layers of smoke rising from a thousand cooking fires in the city far below. Without guessing what burned outside the cow-dung houses in the neighborhoods where the poor lived, they watched the smoke and marveled. Then, in the elevator going down to their room, Terry said weirdly, “You know, there’s a lot riding on this trip.”

This startled her. “What . . .”

For whatever reasons, he wouldn’t answer. For one specific, grievous reason their lives together have been hard, but Terry gives her a bright, hopeful grin. “I can’t wait for you to see it!”

“Where are we going?”

“An amazing, special place.” His face went through a lot of complicated maneuvers, none of which worked out. “Oh, honey. This will make all the difference.”

This made her step away from him, squinting. Married ten years and nothing between them is clear. She and Terry have always had a strange relationship, half needy adoration, half power struggle. “What, Terry? What will?”

“Relax,” he said, and his laugh made Sara wonder if there was such a thing as too joyful. “Let’s live the legend.”

What legend?
She rummaged through what little she knew but all she could come up with were dimly remembered names: Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, Ganesh, oh God, did she have it right, did she even have the right religion? She’d resisted doing homework for this trip and she’d rather die than ask Terry. This was not her country; she was not herself. She was too disrupted and ignorant to ask questions.

On the night train to New Delhi, Sara grappled with mystery and dislocation, compounded by the unbidden knowledge that in a country this far
from home you are always the foreigner, and nothing is what you think. She was upset by the weirdness (Terry’s), followed by the being sick (hers).

It was sudden and apparently endless. Dying inside, she looked down the hole at rushing tracks and faced death at dawn, armed with a tin cup and leaky faucet. Every cramp came as a sickening reminder of the babies she’d lost—twice, and the second time it almost killed her. She was alone in the house. It was abrupt, terrifying, so bloody that Terry promised never to put her through it again.

While she rocked with pain, odd trees and desert rushed by under astounding blue skies sliced by wheeling vultures and she saw that India was beautiful. She looked out the window at great stretches of the vast, changing world studded by villages and train stations overflowing with people.
If I could stay on the train, if I could stay inside anywhere,
she thought,
I’d be OK,
and felt guilty for thinking it.

Momentarily unshelled, rolling through New Delhi in an open car, she was overwhelmed by the noise—not that it was loud. That it came from so many sources. It was as if the entire country was breathing, groaning, tossing, grumbling because nobody was alone for long enough to get any sleep. She thought she could hear all the people in this great, sprawling country; they were all talking, all at once, unless they were wailing in despair—or singing—and the worst part was that she did not know which, or what any of it meant.

Oblivious, Terry grinned as if he expected her to walk into the unknown gladly and face the world of strangers smiling.

She didn’t feel safe until sliding glass doors closed behind them, sealing out the city. After a night and a long day sleeping, after dinner in another elegant hotel restaurant, she felt strong enough to confront him. “What, Terry?” She needed to look into the man she thought she knew, and find out why they were here. “What do you mean, there’s a lot riding on this?”

“Let’s don’t go back there,” he said gently, “not now, when you’re doing so well,” because he had brought her here to help her get past the old losses. Acknowledged master of the old bait and switch, Terry lifted her with his voice. “Look.” His wide gesture took in the indoor waterfall, the tiers of marble balconies where guests prowled with no beggars and no vendors to hound them, no disorderly street life to break the carefully polished surface.