The Black Isle (27 page)

“Now you see what fear does? It collects you.” His eyes were glassy, like an animal possessed.

“Please!”

“I’m not going to kill you. I’m just acquainting you with the truth.” He pushed the keris into my hand and folded my fingers over its handle. “Do it. Row.”

“What?”

“Use both hands. Imagine you are in a canoe. Row.”

I glanced at the ghoulish red smiles on my arms. Warm currents of blood poured down to my hands, mixing with the mud until I seemed to be wearing dark, viscous gloves. Yet I recognized the cruel logic in his words, and having come this far, I now wanted his secrets. Wrapping my left hand over my right, I began paddling.

He continued. “You are angry.”

“Of course I’m angry! How can I not be angry? You tricked me and then you cut me!”

“Good!” He chuckled. “Very good! Use that anger. Sink into it.”

“Stop laughing. I could kill you!”

“Let your emotions collect you, Cassandra. Listen carefully: My badi was an old man, but yours may not be. The badi always takes the shape of someone you know. Don’t be shocked when you see it. Concentrate your emotions, but control them. And be humble when you ask it for power.”

I rowed hard. Left, right. Left, right. The ghosts of the cemetery were gathering around us, perhaps drawn in by my anguish.

An obese Tamil woman, her belly jutting out of her sari, her black mane sweeping the grass. A skinny old Chinese man in a moth-eaten suit. A small European boy in a pale blue sailor top, clawing at the pox on his face. I scanned at least ten others—a girl in a bridal gown, a Zoroastrian priest, a very tall Indian in a top coat. They kept arriving, and I smelled the fetor of their collective past: temple incense, curry, jasmine, sweaty underarms, stale coffee breath, formaldehyde, tobacco, and myrrh…

But these odors didn’t disturb me so much as their vacant, needy stares.

I took my eyes away from them and fixed on Issa’s father’s tombstone instead. Left, right. Left, right. Left, right.

“Yes, that’s the way,” said Issa. “Ignore everything.”

My arms had begun to ache, but still I rowed. And rowed. I found it easier to concentrate once I closed my eyes.

“Very good, Miss Ling…”

“Damn you, Issa, my name is
Cassandra
!” I opened my eyes.

I was surrounded by calm blue water. My eyes burned from the sudden brightness. When I reached up to shield them, my vessel began to list sharply from side to side. I was in a wood canoe—long, narrow, primitive. In my hands was a crude wooden oar. Water in every direction. No sight of land. I knew the only way to regain balance was to keep paddling in a steady rhythm. Left, right. Left, right.

It was just as he’d described—the sky and the sea, with nothing in between.

But wait. A black-robed figure appeared at the edge of the horizon, standing on the water. My eyes were grateful for this new focal point. The robe began walking, and with each step, it seemed to advance a mile.

In seconds, it was at my boat.

Somehow, as much as I tried, I couldn’t look away from the magnetic darkness beneath its enormous cowl.

“You’re my badi,” I said.

“As you wish.” It spoke Shanghainese, with a little girl’s voice.

The black robe fell from her as if peeled off by some invisible hand. Underneath was my sister, five years old and pigtailed, in pink short-sleeved pajamas. She smelled like goodness itself: Florida water, talcum powder, and the faintest trace of fresh-baked almond cookies. Oh, the dimples on her cheeks! Oh, the little hairs on her arms! I longed to grab her and hold her to my chest.

But which twin was she? Xiaowen had the dimples, and Bao-Bao liked wearing pink…or was it the other way around? I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t tell.

“Jie jie.”
She placed one tiny foot on the prow of my canoe and gazed fondly at me. “Look at me,
Jie jie
.”

I turned away. She—it—wasn’t real. In real life, my twins were no longer little girls. They were teenagers. This was a trick by a graveyard sprite. A confidence trick.

“
Jie jie
, have you already forgotten me? Do you know which one I am? Am I Xiaowen or am I Bao-Bao? Can’t you remember?”

My babies were never this solicitous. But the demon was right—I was guilty as charged. I’d let myself forget. The badi lifted her other foot onto the narrow, jutting nose of the canoe and perched herself there, knees bent in a squat like a little gargoyle. With her feet in place, she leaned forward, stretching out her index finger toward my chin. When she touched my skin, I felt the cold burn of an icicle.

“
Jie jie
, you’re hurting my feelings. Why won’t you look at me? I’ve waited so long to see you again. Don’t you love me anymore?”

Her cold finger was strong. It tipped my chin up so that I gazed into her eyes, now very close to my face. I felt myself sinking into them. At the same time, she began to reek of damp earth, not the soil I’d been rubbing on my skin but something fouler and deeper in the ground, older, wetter, and sickeningly familiar…My invisible attacker at the plantation—he’d borne the same coppery odor. This same smell was in my lungs when he pinned me to the bed, when I thought I was going to die…

“Haven’t you come to ask me for something?” the badi hissed. Up close, her babyish features took on a mocking hardness: Mother. “Or are you too proud to
beg
?”

I swung the oar at her.

Instantly the canoe rolled over, throwing me into the sea.

Cold. The water was bone-numbingly cold. I tried to swim but my feet refused to move. They’d become as heavy as anchors, plunging me deeper down the bottomless depths. My throat and lungs burned with salt water as darker and darker blues, then the blackest black, engulfed me. Even as I flailed with my arms, I continued to sink, lower and lower. I was being smothered, swallowed up by pure color.

When I couldn’t sink any farther, a pair of rough hands seized me.

“What did you do?”

It was Issa, shaking me, furious. “Cassandra!”

I was back in the cemetery, collapsed atop his father’s grave, clutching the keris. The ghosts were still there, watching my bewilderment with their impassive faces.

I despised them all.

“What happened?” Issa asked.

“I can’t—” I picked myself up off the ground. Once the confusion subsided, once I realized the whole excursion had been trick upon trick upon trick, I hurled the dagger at his feet. “I never asked for this.”

I ran. In just a few yards, I was out of the cemetery’s silent heart. An explosive rip, then the noises of the real world: crickets, crows, frogs, wild dogs, and the night breeze, all crying for dominance, every voice shrieking. Plugging my ears with my fingers did no good. Every sound tore at me.

“Your hearing will return,” said Issa, his words booming above the din. The disappointment in his voice was crystalline: “Wait for me in the car.”

I staggered past the wandering ghosts of the cemetery, their bloodless lips rippling, murmuring indecipherable secrets. Together their whispers made a unified shushing, not unpleasant, like dead leaves being blown in the wind. Testimonies, apologies, prayers? They seemed to be gravitating toward a single point, every one of them—and I realized that the locus was Issa.

“What’s going to happen to the badi?” I cried.

“Go to the car.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“I said, go!”

He turned to the ghosts. Two women, one in a sari and another in a bridal gown, were standing before him, expectant. He received them with raised arms, palms facing down, a pagan pope offering some kind of benediction. Both ghosts tilted their heads up as he lowered each palm to cover their faces. As he closed his eyes, his lips began to move, not quivering in the way theirs were but in a calm recitation of an ancient formula in an ancient tongue.

Watching Issa in action, I felt a surge of awe. So this was how powerful he really was. Until then, he’d been all braggadocio, all portentous guff. How wrong I was to assume he was
just
a chauffeur! I couldn’t look away. I had to see what he could and would do. My curiosity was mainly selfish—I was thrilled to learn that I was no longer alone. That I wasn’t the only one who
saw
, that I wasn’t the only one who had to deal with
them
. Issa’s strength gave me an enormous rush of relief because as long as he bore the burden of keeping the spirit world in check,
I would be free
.

Of his incantation, I caught just one word—
tidur
, which was Malay for “sleep.” His hands continued to press down on the faces of the ghosts. Meeting with some resistance, he grimaced and his arms shuddered, but he didn’t stop.

Both ghosts began to sink into the soil, feetfirst. Issa appeared to be sending them home “to sleep.” Lower and lower they sank, until the pull of the subterranean vortex took over and he no longer had to exert any force. Soon there was no trace of the women. Two new ghosts had advanced from the group to take their place.

“Cassandra, go!” Already he was repeating the strange burial, palms raised.

“I heard you.”

My ears stopped ringing when I reached the cemetery gates. I gazed down at my arms, wondering how I was going to explain away the cuts to Daniel. But both wounds had vanished, and my clothes showed no trace of blood. All that remained was dirt—the earth I had smeared all over my face and arms. The illusion of the keris was another effect of Issa’s
ilmu
.

I waited in the car, drained yet exhilarated, monitoring the shadows cast by the wrought-iron gates. Nothing moved. Whatever exorcism Issa was conducting within the cemetery, none of the drama spilled out here. The ghost world was being contained by someone far abler than me.

I rejoiced. It probably sounds like the most feeble-minded response in the face of war, but the human heart will often react to crisis in the most inappropriate way.

That night, sitting in the car, I felt that for the first time in my life, after years of tolerating Father’s weakness and Li’s erratic behavior, I was in the care of wise and capable men—Mr. Wee in charge of earthly matters and Issa of spiritual ones. These strong, powerful men would make sure no harm ever came to me.

When Issa finally emerged, he was in his long-sleeved shirt. Somehow he had been able to wash off the mud. I felt a burst of pride at how stoic and regal he looked.

“Issa!”

He walked briskly to the car and, without a word, started the engine. The shirt clung to his skin, drenched in perspiration. As he drove, I tried to dry the sweat beading on the nape of his neck, but as my handkerchief neared, his skin bloomed with a million pale goose bumps.

“I thought you’d be braver than that,” he said. “You always said, ‘I’m not frightened; I’m not scared.’ And I believed you.”

His rage took me by surprise. It seemed unwarranted, considering how he had matters under control.

“Issa, I wasn’t scared. I was angry.”

He said nothing.

“So did you get rid of the badi?”

He swallowed but still said nothing.

“What about the ghosts?”

“They were supposed to be your army.”

“Against who? The Japs?”

“Against anyone. Where human strength is not enough, we should seek
external
help.”

Issa said nothing more and I didn’t pursue the matter. He was seething. All I wanted was to go home and wash the filth off my body.

What I couldn’t have realized at the time, of course, was that in abandoning the ritual, I had lost my chance to master my own gift, to alter the cruel course of history. It remains, to this day, the greatest sorrow of my life that I did not beg Issa’s forgiveness and run back into the cemetery to complete what I had left undone.

It would have been that simple.

Because of my delusions, however justified or unjustified, because of my pride, however right or wrong, people I loved would perish in terrible ways. Of course, I cannot say for certain how many lives I might have saved, how many families I could have kept together, or how history would have been changed, but I do know that in the foolish complacency of a single night, in my choice of mediocrity over distinction, precious, innocent lives were lost. Oh, history.

I would never be clean again.

We cruised across the Edinburgh Bridge, the oldest suspension bridge on the Isle, arching gracefully over the Black River, gas lamps ablaze. Despite its name, the gray steel structure was constructed in Glasgow by convict labor in 1869 and then shipped over, grommet by grommet, chain by chain, and reassembled here. It was such a source of civic pride that policemen chased squatters off it every sunset. Tonight, under the full moon, carrying no one but us, the bridge looked especially desolate.

The surest sign of my remarkable shortsightedness must be that as we drove in silence along this overpass, all I could think of was how there was nothing lonelier in the world than an empty bridge in the night.

I had told Issa I wanted to be normal. But events accelerated the next morning, and in the merciless rush to keep up with them, normalcy became the first casualty.

Our breakfast was served out of tins: kippers, followed by peaches in syrup. Mr. Wee, Violet, Daniel, and I washed the food down with Earl Grey tea and gathered at the back door to watch Subramaniam and the gardeners. As Mr. Wee ordered, they had uprooted the rosebushes by the servants’ wing, leaving deep holes in the ground that were then lined with clay tiles. Once they finished, the servants brought out the family’s treasures—Fabergé eggs, china tea sets, and Mrs. Wee’s old jewelry—triple-wrapped in burlap sacks and packed them into these subterranean coffers. When this was done, the gardeners began putting the rosebushes back in place.

I couldn’t help but smile at how my affair with the ruby earrings had foreshadowed this current frenzy. No doubt the pair was experiencing a second burial. So much for the excessive drama of before. Now everybody was digging, scrambling.

“Careful,” Mr. Wee cautioned the servants repeatedly. He called Little Girl over and unclasped the gold Rolex from his wrist. “Seal this in something watertight and bury it in a more secure spot. But make sure you remember where. This was a gift from my father. I’d like someday to pass it on.”