The Black Isle (18 page)

I could only stare at the outline of my new employer. She slept resolutely, flat on her back with her hands clasped over her rib cage, like one pantomiming the act of slumber. Only people in movies slept like this. As for me, my role seemed no different from a watchman at the morgue: I was guarding somebody who was effectively dead. My bored eyes combed the room.

I began to lure shapes out of the velvety black. The four posts defined the boundaries of the bed, the square blob was the dresser, the two squat men in conical hats were table lamps. Suddenly, out of the darkness came a low, ominous rumble. This went on for about half a minute.

Eventually, I realized it was my stomach. It needed food.

I sought out the low table Mrs. Wee had mentioned. It was so close by that I nearly toppled it by reaching out of my chair. Thankfully, she didn’t even stir. On the table sat a platter stacked high with small rectangles, each as stiff as a blackboard duster. I picked one up and bit into it. Revolting! It was filled with margarine, ham, and cucumber slices, each layer staler than the one before. The lot of them had probably been sitting there for days. Yet I continued eating. I’d had no dinner, and come to think of it, no lunch before that. I only stopped when the crumbs got caught in my throat—no water—and reached for the decanter of cognac, again careful not to wake my slumbering client. I took a swig from the cut-crystal bottle. The liquor seared a fiery trail down my gullet, but I felt weirdly sated. I sipped again.

My eyes teased out more shapes. The bulging curtains seemed to be harboring silent children. There were about a dozen pillows on the bed, each like a dozing cat. I’d never known one person to need this many pillows, or cats. The grandfather clock gonged—sounding distant one time, intimate the next. Half past ten. Was it really only half past ten? Impossible! These hours were stretching out mercilessly. The job was proving worse than any night watchman’s, who could at least enjoy the indelicate freedom to whistle.

Just then, a wave of coolness came cascading down my arms from above. I took it for a shiver of exhaustion. But the once-solid ceiling had suddenly become an open window, revealing an infinite blackness, like the night sky, save for the lack of stars. The edges of this rectangle began to snow. But it wasn’t snowflakes that fell; it was numinous dust, akin to the pinpricks one saw after staring too long at the dark.

The dust glowed brighter, turning into sparks I was sure would land on my skin with tiny electric pulses. But as they floated weightlessly down, they vaporized into wisps of smoke that drifted toward the center of the room, forming a white, phosphorescent cross over Mrs. Wee. It was uncannily beautiful, like the precursor to a fairy godmother’s entrance or a soprano’s closing aria.

Illuminated by the glow, Mrs. Wee stirred like a horse shaking off flies but did not wake. A figure took form in the gathering smoke, directly above the bed. It looked eerily like Mrs. Wee, but younger, in her late thirties. This spectral Mrs. Wee hovered in the air, gazing down placidly. So seamlessly had I blended into the room that the ghost did not register my presence.

Or so I thought.

“Ah, the new girl.” She said this without turning to me. Her voice was filled with echoes and sibilance, as if it were being transmitted by radio from far off.

“Stop tormenting yourself,” I said. “Everything’s fine. Go back to sleep.”

It was clear she couldn’t hear me. I tried again, lowering my voice into a whisper, to match hers.

“Go back to sleep. There’s nobody here.”

The spirit continued to hover, still not hearing me.

I tried several approaches until, exasperated, I drew in a long, deep breath. As I released the air from the very bottom of my lungs, my voice became slow, low, old, filling the cold room:

“Sleep, please…”

This time, I broke through.

“I have every right to be here, you know. This used to be my room.”

I was so thrilled by my triumph that I almost laughed. But I continued to hold my voice steady, emitting it from deep down in my gut: “It still is, Mrs. Wee.”

The spirit now turned to face me.

“Yes, I
am
Mrs. Wee, only not the Mrs. Wee you think. Not the aged Mrs. Wee lying in that bed below, so wracked with guilt she’s not had a decent night’s sleep in ten years. Oh no.”

“You mean then you’re her younger self.”

The spirit scoffed. “This isn’t
A Christmas Carol
, my little ragamuffin. I’m the
original
Mrs. Wee. The first, the true. Claimed by malaria ten years ago, only to find my old-maid sister getting chummy with my lonesome fool of a husband. Damn that Ignatius! What a drab gal she was, too. They married three months later, you know. And there I was, thinking poor Betsy would be alone for the rest of her life.”

The dying Mrs. Wee’s dead sister. “You’ve been haunting her since then?”

“Ten years and she never once noticed me. Then all of a sudden, hysteria. Poor girl must be on her last legs.”

“Which is why you should leave her be. She’s miserable.” I tried placation. “Besides, you’re in a better place than she is.”

“How would you know? Anyone sent you postcards?”

I kept quiet. A sarcastic spirit. Did all ghosts cleave to their old ticks and quirks? If so, she was probably right: Hers wasn’t a better place.

I closed my eyes to ignore the ghost—but she had plans of her own.

“How would you like to see an old woman scream?” she said brightly. “I find it can be quite bracing.” She floated two steps back and threw her arms up high, preparing to summon her sister.

“There must be something I can do for you,” I said as a last resort, “to help settle that score.”

“Quid pro quo?” She lowered her arms. “Come to think of it…Yes, of course. Certainly. Could you give me my life back? My husband? My children? She despises my children, you know. Thinks they’re spoiled rotten, which is true, but still I’d like them back. Think you can manage all that?”

I grimaced.

“Not so powerful now, are you?”

“Be reasonable.”

“What makes you think
reason
has anything to do with this?”

I took a breath. “What else has she got of yours that you want returned?”

“My pigeon’s blood earrings.” She said this with a speed that seemed to surprise even herself. “Iggy bought them for me on a trip to Hong Kong. He wanted to bury me with them, but Betsy of course told the undertaker no. Said it would be a terrible waste. Not that she ever wore them herself. I think they clashed with her moles.” She cackled sourly. “Anyway, there they are.”

She hurled a cluster of sparks on Mrs. Wee’s teak dresser. I tiptoed over and gingerly opened the top drawer. The exquisite earrings glistened, little cascading lanterns of cut rubies three inches long. They were laid out on a black velvet panel that flaunted their shimmer even more. In comparison, the rest of the jewelry in the drawer was dowdy—cultured pearls and generic jade teardrops.

“What should I do with them?”

“Use your imagination. Failing that, a burial in the back garden should do.”

Easy. “Consider it done. Will this give you peace?”

“Beggars can’t be choosers.”

I grunted.

The ghost threw me a playful smile. “But it’s the thought that counts.”

Daylight was seeping through the cracks of the curtains. It was dawn. Though it only felt like minutes, I must have been negotiating for hours.

As more light poured into the room, I gazed at the stack of sandwiches. Each and every one was covered in a blanket of gray mold.

The courtyard was abuzz at dawn. Agnes the Rottweiler was in her cage, but this did not stop her from baying at me as I walked toward the servants’ wing. It was as if she could smell the ruby earrings in my brassiere.

The Tamil groundskeeper, Subramaniam, was crouching by the dog with a flap of bloody sirloin. Evidently he also had the loathsome task of feeding the monster. Nodding to me apologetically, he said, “This dog, ah, very unpredictable.” He extended his right hand and showed me the awkward dent where chewed-off flesh had been sewn up by a back-alley surgeon.

While Subramaniam’s men tended the grounds, Saudah the Sumatran washerwoman rolled up her sleeves and began running water into two enormous basins. She and Subramaniam traded morning greetings—“
Selamat
!” “Salaam!”—and then she waved at me with a hand coated in suds. Happy to be included, I waved back.

The servants all seemed to get along, except for one notable exception: Issa the wordless Bugis chauffeur. He had just begun his slow daily ritual of washing and waxing the family’s black Bentley. Issa looked at no one, spoke to no one, and yet seemed perfectly attuned to every exchange going on around him. The others left him alone. Just watching him lean across the car, with his warrior’s physique and long, black mane, I understood why. He wore thick gold cuffs on both ears, proud emblems of his seafaring origins—pirate ancestors, undoubtedly—and his watchful, hooded eyes made it clear he did not wish to be disturbed. I thought I saw him take a fleeting glance at me but seconds later was sure I’d been wrong.

I scurried past the lot of them, the ruby earrings icy against my flesh.

The rose garden at the far end of the servants’ wing was hidden and unattended. Using a trowel that had been left in a flower pot, I dug a small hole at the base of the reddest rosebush and buried the earrings. Red under red, for symbolism’s sake.

Heading back to my room, I sneaked a peek at the caged Agnes. She was sitting on her haunches, quietly watching me. Good dog, good doggy.

The thing about civilized ghosts, I thought with enormous relief, was that they were reasonable—unlike the ones in the jungle with their irrational rage. And now, now I could
speak
to them!

Once in my room, I shooed away the harmless old Sikh. “Privacy, man!” I said in my new gut-whisper, and then fell into victorious slumber. I’d survived my first night.

Watching Mrs. Wee became a breeze. The ghost did not appear that night, the next night, nor the night after that. Burying those earrings had indeed brought peace to her dead sister. Emboldened by my success, I toted slim books, hidden on my person, as I reported to duty each night. Once my client fell asleep, I settled behind the damask curtains and read by moonlight. This way, I always had Baudelaire near and dear, his
Flowers of Evil
helping to soak up the lonely hours between ten and seven.

After a week, Little Girl took me aside. She was all smiles as usual, but I sensed a touch of jealousy. Shanghai girls are skilled at camouflaging poisonous thoughts, but we’re equally gifted at spotting them.

“I don’t know what you’ve been doing, but it’s obviously working,” she said. “I haven’t seen Mrs. Wee so calm, so refreshed in the mornings. You must work some kind of jungle magic.”

After this barbed praise, she handed me my first pay envelope, the largest sum I’d ever held in my young life.

I celebrated my small triumph by taking Li out for a lunch of Russian shashlik at the Troika on High Street, in the heart of the shopping district. Russian imperial cuisine was all the rage on the Isle because it had been all the rage in Shanghai ten years before, and it didn’t matter that the version we got here was prepared by Hainanese cooks who’d never once set foot in Leningrad.

The restaurant’s circular driveway was filled with deluxe sedans—gleaming Cadillacs, Lincolns, and Studebakers—their Malay drivers chatting and smoking away in the shade of a banyan tree. Li and I slouched toward the entrance, feeling underdressed and underchauffeured. Once inside, the maître d’s surliness did nothing to assuage our unease.

 Li turned back toward the door. “Let’s just scram.”

I grabbed his arm. “I’m treating you to lunch and I say we stay.”

We were seated at a romantic horseshoe booth, wedged awkwardly against the music stage. Two elderly, bearded Jews were perched on bar stools, strumming balalaikas as the lunch crowd chattered on, paying them no attention.

Minutes later, ironically, it was I who became eager to leave.

“I went to see him last week,” Li said. “He needs us.”

My stomach tightened. “Can we not discuss him until we finish eating?”

“Why do you hate him so much?”

“Why don’t
you
?”

He sighed as if I were being childish. “You have to know what’s happening.”

“Can’t it wait? We’re celebrating.”

But Li couldn’t wait. He launched into a story that I only partially heard. “He’s got a stall at Wonder World now…Takes water, melts rock sugar in it, then throws in some pounded-up agar. Calls it
bird’s nest water
…has a sign extolling its virtues and all that. Profit’s not too bad, but not great either.”

“So?”

“Thing is, he’s in debt. Deep in debt. He owes the Triads. Seems like everyone in Wonder World owes them something.”

“That’s his problem.”

“No. It’s ours.”

“It never ends, does it?” I stopped a waiter passing by our table. “Please bring me your most expensive vodka. It needn’t be any good—just the most expensive.” I would sooner squander my pay on drink than give Father a cent. Li shook his head.

When my drink arrived—my first vodka and it was a generous double shot—I downed it at one go, my eyes fixed defiantly on Li. My throat burned worse than after Mrs. Wee’s cognac. I coughed, annoyed at myself for showing weakness.

Li sucked in his breath, waiting to resume, and intensify, his lecture. So when the same waiter walked by again, I asked for more vodka. The waiter gave me a patronizing chortle, but I was determined not to be cowed. “Now,” I barked.

Li leaned into the table. “At Wonder World they’re hiring psychics, clairvoyants, that sort of thing. They’re looking for girls who can talk to spirits—or who can act like they can.” He looked at me significantly. “Pay’s not bad. And it’s not all that shady.”

“
Not all that shady
?”