The Black Isle (35 page)

“Agnes…”

That name stirred something within the creature’s core. It closed its massive jaws and sat down on Mr. Wee’s legs, suddenly more man than dog.

“Are you the badi?” I asked it. “Will you help me? Please? I beg you.”

It tipped its head sideways, as if it wanted to understand me but could not.

“We can win this war. Help me, Agnes.”

The beast leapt back at the name, snarling, insulted. It retreated behind the rosebushes, where it stood with its arms folded, like a disappointed schoolmaster.

“Momoko!” came the familiar voice.

I turned to see that my “husband” had arrived. Taro peeled away from his young wards and stepped briskly onto the mud.

I called out to the dog-man, “Stop this man for me, Agnes. Please!”

The creature had begun skulking away. It wanted nothing to do with me now that Taro was here.

“Agnes, don’t go!” I turned to Taro. “Do you see that thing?”

His hand lashed across my face: No.

I split my attention between Taro and the spirit, one coming, the other departing, feverish about how the scene might play out. Anything could happen now that my badi was here. There was still hope; there was still time. I could salvage everything.

“Agnes, come back. Please!”

Taro threw another hard slap across my cheek. The dog-man sprinted away on all fours and bounded over the back wall of the property, disappearing for good.

The experiment had been a complete failure. Instead of raising an army, I had set loose a spirit, a monster, whatever it was. I didn’t need a bomoh like Issa to tell me there would be repercussions.

“You’re worthless,” I said to myself. “Worthless.”

Taro agreed.

“You shame me,” he said. He caressed the spot where he’d struck me and took a more soothing tone. “The boys were worried you’d lost your mind. From now on, just to be safe, no more walks for you.”

One evening, we had guests. Until I was told the occasion was related to the autumn solstice, I had no idea that ten months had gone by, since the Black Isle saw no seasons beyond rain and no rain. I had endured ten months’ shame.

Taro stayed close by my side, as he often did when others were present, in order to explain to me yet another of his countrymen’s customs. Their traditions often struck me as corruptions of Chinese ones, made more rigidly ceremonial, more fanatically devoted to hierarchy, and much more obsessed with death. This one was no different.

Arrayed around the sitting room, on every conceivable hard surface, was a constellation of lit candles. Seated on the floor, facing the center, were twenty soldiers in uniform, their boyish faces made even smoother by candlelight.

“This is an ancient storytelling game,” Taro whispered into my ear. “The boys have been begging me to let them do this, but I made them wait for a moonless night. More atmospheric, you see.”

We moved to the doorway, where we could view the action discreetly. The boys were starting to titter, perhaps experiencing second thoughts as they gazed up at the bleeding Christ over the mantel. Too late. The ceremony was about to start, and Taro—if not Christ—was going to judge them.

“The game begins with a hundred candles. Each boy will tell an old ghost story, a short one, like Aesop’s fables without the moralizing; then he will blow out a candle. And so on. The legend is that when the last candle is blown out and the room is completely dark, a ghost will appear.”

A ghost? Aside from my botched summoning, the dead never visited anymore—they were too wise for that.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” I asked him.

He smiled. “Don’t spoil the mood.”

A thin boy with the pinched, self-serious air of a head prefect cleared his throat and the chatter around the room ceased. He took the honor of being first speaker earnestly, intoning his story with the gravity of a village raconteur. Taro smiled and shook his head but did not bother to translate. Once he was done, the boy sucked in his breath and puffed out the candle closest to him. His comrades applauded politely.

“What did he say?” I asked Taro.

“A myth about an old woman who flies around searching for her missing arm, from a Noh play. Quite childish, in my opinion.”

The second and the third boys told their tales and blew out respective candles. Again, Taro didn’t translate them for me, and I began to feel impatient.

“Botan Doro,”
he said just as the fourth boy began. “He’s telling the story of the Peony Lantern. Do you know it? It’s Chinese in origin. Shocking, but quite poorly structured, like most Chinese tales.”

The fourth candle went out. The night was going to be long indeed if Taro refused to do any translating. I made a motion to retreat upstairs, but he grabbed my arm.

“Wait,” he said, and listened as the fifth boy began. This one earned a smile of approval from him. “The story of Kiyohime.” A tremor of excitement shot through the room. The audience, likewise, was energized.

“Kiyohime was the daughter of a village innkeeper,” Taro explained. “Every year, a handsome young monk named Anchin stopped at the inn while making his annual pilgrimage to a shrine, and every year Kiyohime fell more in love with him. Finally one year, she was so overcome by her emotions that she confessed them to the monk. He was terrified—he was a monk, after all. He immediately fled from her, back to his monastery. He had seen the mad lust in her eyes. Furious, Kiyohime chased him for miles but found herself stopped at the Hidaka River, which he had crossed in a boat. Her rage grew and grew until her lower body transformed into a sea serpent, and she swam across the water. When the other monks warned Anchin that she was approaching, he hid under his temple’s large bronze bell. Possessing the instincts of a snake, Kiyohime found him all the same. She coiled her snake body around the bell, and so intense was her fury that she melted it, killing them both and melding them together forever.”

Taro applauded the loudest at the end of this tale, causing the storyteller to blush and bow his head. The others turned to glimpse the rare sight of their lieutenant colonel showing approval. I myself knew how uncommon this was.

“You may go now, if you like,” he told me as the sixth storyteller began. “I’m staying to see which of my boys starts wailing like a girl before the end.”

I went upstairs and prepared for bed. Every four or five minutes came the clatter of applause from downstairs. I waited for the mewls of panic but guessed we’d have to be deeper into the night for any to emerge. I fell asleep before Taro could join me.

Sometime later, I jolted awake. I was alone still. The room was black, no moonlight. Not a peep from downstairs either. Was the game over? I flicked on my bedside lamp.

There was a man in my room. He sat cross-legged on the floor, startlingly gaunt.

Father!

He was close enough to touch me with his bony hand and I dreaded that he would. I didn’t want to feel just how frail it was, how unlike the hand that once possessed the vigor to hurt me. Had Taro brought him here to see me? If so, my separate worlds were colliding again.

“My precious daughter,” he said in the musical Shanghainese of our lost world. He spoke it as if it were our own private language, partaken by nobody else, but his voice had a terrifying hollowness. “I have died.”

The meaning of his words quickly took hold.

“Don’t cry, my girl,” he said with a kindness I hadn’t seen since childhood. “I know you did your best, and I’m relieved that I’ve found you again.”

“What did they do to you?”

“The afternoon you saw them take us, they threw us into Queenstown Prison. They’d heard that Chinese rebels were living in our slum—and yes, those rumors were true. Your brother was one of them. Brave boy. But nobody would talk so they blindfolded us and took us away. I only know it was a beach because I could smell the sea and feel the sand between my toes. The waves were very quiet, very calm, like the whispers of children who knew not to interfere while grownups were talking. And then they ordered us to wade into the water. I thought they were going to make us swim until we drowned, but that would have been much too slow. I felt the water rise up to my knees and…they shot us.”

My stomach lurched. “Was Li with you?”

“That’s what I’ve come to tell you. They didn’t take him. As you saw, his skin had become quite dark. And he remembered many phrases from our plantation days. He convinced them he was a Malay, clever boy, and they let him go. It is strange how what shames us can sometimes return to save us.”

Thank heavens, Li had heeded my advice after all.

“There are so many things I want to tell you but my energy is nearly gone. So let me hurry: Li’s survived so far on his wits but his luck’s run out. Last week, two soldiers caught him stealing a bao. A
bao
! You know how he needs his nutrition. They’ve locked him up at Shahbandar and his anemia has gone from bad to worse. You must save him. At the very least, visit him, feed him, make sure he’s all right.”

“But I’m trapped here, Father! Can’t you see? I’m a prisoner, too.”

“I beg you. You’re his only hope…” His voice trailed off. “Our family…”

The bedroom door clicked open, and as I turned to look, Father vanished—without any kind of good-bye. Now I wished he
had
tried to touch me with his bony hand. In death, he was gentler and more compassionate than he’d been in years. I felt abandoned, robbed of our final words.

Taro stepped into the room, reeking of sake. He’d begun to undress when he realized I was awake and that the light was on. But he barely noticed my face or he would have seen my tears.

“Can’t you sleep? Did the talk of ghosts bother you?” He flopped into bed with a sigh, hurling his shirt onto the floor. “I hope you don’t believe in that rubbish, a sensible woman like you. Now, turn off your light.”

I did as I was told and scanned the darkness for Father. Nothing.

“How did the game end?” I asked.

“Of course, nothing happened, but it didn’t stop them from acting like terrified sissies. One of the boys, Takara, claimed he saw a cloud of white smoke rushing up the stairs. ‘Like cotton wool?’ I asked him. ‘No, sir,’ he said. ‘Like your breath on a cold winter’s night, sir.’” He paused for a moment, then added, laughing, “Tomorrow, I’m assigning that fool to sentry duty in the jungle—alone!”

I waited till he was settled against his pillow before I brought my fingers to his waist and caressed his beef-fed, sake-filled belly.

“Your hands!” He flung them away. “They’re as cold as a corpse’s!”

I rested my head on his chest instead and let my tears pool on his skin.

“What’s the matter now?”

“I miss my brother.”

“And what’s inspired this mawkish display?”

“It’s been much too long. He needs me.”

He gave a lascivious chuckle. “
Needs
you?”

“He’s not just my brother; he’s my twin. You can’t really understand unless you have a twin. Couldn’t he stay here with us? He’s good, very good, I promise.”

“How good? Should I consider corrupting him?”

I clutched at his arm. “If we’re kept apart for too long, we fade.”

“I see you’ve let those stories go to your head. People aren’t ghosts, Momoko—they don’t
fade
.” He turned on his side and yawned. “I’m tired. We’ll discuss it in the morning.”

As I feared, there was no discussion in the morning.

Taro decided that a change of scenery would cure whatever ailed me, and I was whisked away to the beach house. Yes, he had accepted Mr. Wee’s “offer” and had wasted no time in claiming the place as his own, having revamped its interior so that it now resembled a rustic Japanese cabin: floors covered wall to wall with tatami mats and funerary white paper lanterns strung everywhere. The Wees’ expensive chairs, tables, and settees had been thrown onto a bonfire and the orchid-print curtains replaced by bamboo shades in the same sickly hue as the mats. The house that had once felt like an idyllic refuge was now an austere, bare-bones penitentiary, devoid of anything soft or luxurious.

Through the windows, I saw that hundreds of papayas had fallen, overripe, from their trees, splattering puddles of orange vomit on the grass. Taro must have felt that tropical fruit was beneath him and ordered his men not to touch them. I burned with rage at the willful waste—elsewhere on the Isle, good people were starving.

“Enjoy your rest,” Taro told me before leaving me in what used to be the sitting room but now contained nothing to sit on. “I’ll collect you when you’re recovered.”

“How long do I have to be here?”

“That’s entirely up to you, Momoko.”

He strode back to his car as four blank-faced underlings created a human wall between us. Without once glancing back, my “husband” drove off. The quartet of young soldiers didn’t move a muscle until the engine putter of his car was drowned beneath the crashing of waves. But once he was gone, these tin soldiers sprang to life, throwing off their hats and boots, unbuttoning their shirts, and prancing through the house with the single-minded vivacity of children. They didn’t pay me the slightest attention.

Following them out to the back verandah, I watched them race one another toward the surf, stripping down to diaperlike jockstraps. Months had passed since the beach had been draped in jellyfish, and I wondered if these boys had been the ones who’d disposed of the mess or if nature had done her own housework. Whatever it was, the strand was as good as new.

The four boys approached a line of men already at the water’s edge. There were about thirty of them, dressed in civilian clothes, soaking their bare feet along the sea foam. I wasn’t the only prisoner being held here, after all.

However, I was the only living one: The men on the beach were ghosts.

I looked for Father among them. No luck. There must have been other beaches where countless other men had been gunned down. The lost souls here faced the blue yonder with waves lapping at their calves, stoic memorials to their own murders. For
whom
they stood, I had no clue, since their martyrdom would go unnoticed unless more people started growing eyes like mine.