When she had first become conscious of her unusual beauty, Ariah had experimented as a chameleon. She had relationships with several men and with each took on the guise of a female stereotype. She became bitchy, pious, shy or indifferent, simply to witness their reactions. Whatever role she chose, her beauty succeeded in swaying men to do anything for her.
One day, as she played the role of a sweet and serious researcher, she met a handsome man at a wedding. They dated for a year and then married. Her new husband asked her to manage a charitable foundation for children. The foundation belonged to his father, a high-ranking official. Ariah left her job at the lab.
Not long after, Ariah discovered that her husband, like most sons of officials, was carrying on relationships with several women. One of them seemed to have become a favourite. Ariah knew the woman: a singer, beautiful, younger than she was. Ariah wanted a divorce but her husband refused, wanting to uphold his reputation. She was a beautiful and intelligent woman, yet she was being kept as a trophy wife. According to her, her husband had been like a gnome incessantly panning for treasure, arranging, collecting. He had been after a wife, a lover and a perfect reputation, all at once.
She spoke as if possessed by her tales. I watched her face grow more and more contorted.
Her comfortable life had begun to feel drab. She frequently returned to the fantasy worlds of her youth. She imagined the Evil Queen, role model for her aborted career as a scientist, venturing into a serpentine underground chamber, coming across her victims’ skeletons, crossing rivers at midnight, exploring forests, scrambling over cliffs. The Evil Queen transformed herself into whatever she wanted, beautiful damsel or ugly crone.
In Ariah’s formulation, the glamour of experimenting lay in metamorphosis.
She no longer spoke of chameleons, but of butterflies. Not changing clothes, but shedding skin. She had contacted friends from long before and had returned to work in a lab. One night, alone with all those chemicals, she opened a bottle and doused her face with liquid. Her gorgeous features blistered in an instant, corroded beyond recognition.
I shuddered. Not skin cancer – this was even more awful. She wasn’t on the verge of death. Not at all.
Ariah had lost consciousness and had been rushed to the hospital. Nobody tried to investigate what had happened. Her husband divorced her shortly afterwards and supplied her with an enormous settlement.
I’d been dragged into a universe of tales so terrible and yet so riveting, I could only gape. I still couldn’t fathom what made her destroy herself – divorce, money, boredom?
My sweaty fingers clutched a cigarette until it grew damp. This woman didn’t just love tales. She lived them.
‘How marvellous,’ she said cryptically, ‘that the body can be so malleable and change however you want.’
She had a tyrant’s arrogance. She celebrated her metamorphosis. And it’s not like she had become a butterfly. Then, heightening my alarm, she whispered, ‘And, haven’t I also managed to capture you?’
—
What could be more terrifying than a devil that speaks truth?
After two months, I still crouched inside the wardrobe, awaiting her. Every morning I hurried to leave the house, playing along with Beauty’s game, until we got to a place where she swore, scratched, hurt me. My wife was surprised, even angry, that I was no longer job-hunting, especially when my contract was about to expire.
As for my beautiful wife, who knows what she felt more generally. Of course, thanks to my deal with the devil, we warded off a descent into poverty. But I now allotted more time for work. More precisely, I threw myself into it. I began to avoid my wife for fear that she might notice the scratches and bites on my body. I was Ariah’s, so she left marks on me, a slave owner branding her chattel with an iron. I would make love with my wife in the dark. It was excruciating. Another figure forced its way into my head. The incongruous image of a woman with a perfect body and a grotesque face. And – by this point I had lost my mind – I was disappointed when I didn’t see that repulsive face and when I wasn’t slapped, insulted, degraded. While my body thirsted for that electric shock, shards of that damned story would break off and rearrange themselves in my head.
She had indeed ensnared me, the devil woman. And because she was a real devil, she knew that she had done so. Stroking my back, which was still stinging from the raking of her nails, she said, ‘No woman can satisfy you like I do.’
How I hated to hear it, and how right she was. Her next statement was more chilling.
‘Leave your boring life behind. Come and be an adventurer with me.’
Had she become interested in me, or even fallen in love? Yet her attitude was more like that of a prophet with a new covenant to offer; she wanted to make me her disciple. I felt sick to my stomach but couldn’t stop to figure out where she wanted to lead me.
Maybe she had made the same offer to the six other men, the slaves who had managed to escape. And she called them failures.
Out of nowhere, bizarre whispers filled my head. The hissing of a demon. Come with me. Let’s run.
I tensed. These were the temptations of a devil, luring me, testing every weak point. But I bowed my knees in the presence of palpable evil.
‘There will never be a dull moment by my side,’ she said.
I wasn’t sure if I was encountering seduction or disaster, as I felt myself slowly sucked in. I began to imagine what would happen if I left my beautiful wife for this gruesome-looking woman. People would regard me as a corpse that had reappeared from the dead, disturbing the peace as it spread maggots around town. I would be unable to return to my world.
But maybe that would be unnecessary.
These thoughts were so foul that I needed to purge them. I flailed, sought a grip. I tried to revive the whole picture of my past, before I had become captive to this sick tale.
‘Experimenting together is such a thrill.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We can be a devoted couple and honeymoon in the great cities of the world,’ she said. ‘Deep down, don’t you long to be transformed?’
I looked at her, stunned. She continued slowly, ‘I’ll make you just as hideous as I am.’
A cold sweat dampened my brow. She wanted to turn me into a monster too. I felt her stories spread through my body, corroding the foundations of my world. My ashen face made her chortle, then she gave me a rough shove. Mounting me, she beat me savagely.
My body didn’t react as I hoped. Unable to escape her grip, my addiction to her was obvious. I even begged her to hurt me. Rape me. She shrieked with hysterical laughter and granted my request.
This madness had to come to an end.
With great difficulty, I managed to control my thoughts. Six slaves had understood their plight long before I had, but it wasn’t too late. I would quit my job then and there.
Armed with what was left of my sanity, I sought to bargain with the devil. Once our abject lovemaking was over, I sat facing her.
‘I can’t be with you any more. My wife is pregnant.’
I bowed my face to hide my lie. A whiff of animal odour mixed with blood filled my nostrils. I don’t know why but I inhaled that scent deeply.
I calmed my panting and mustered the will to terminate the contract. I promised to pay compensation of a month’s wages.
Hearing this, she just smiled ever so faintly. But the disgusting boils on her face hardened and I thought I could spy evil in her eyes.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow is your last day of work.’
—
I shouldn’t have come. But some impulse had made me want to see her one last time. Like a junkie, I thought. A ritual of closure before I straightened out. A farewell of sorts to the depravity that had seduced me, which I would taste no more. The end of any story is a compromise, as she had once said.
I crouched there in the wardrobe, waiting for her, counting my heartbeats before I could finally pounce. Then I heard a heavy click. The
wardrobe doors were being locked.
I called her name, hesitant, not daring to guess what was happening. She didn’t answer. My calls grew increasingly urgent, then turned into screams. This was no time to joke. Or to experiment.
The hair on the back of my neck bristled as that evil word reverberated in my head. I pounded on the solid teak. When that didn’t work I heaved against the door. It was all in vain. My rape uniform was drenched in sweat. I caught the stench of her presence. Then another smell invaded the closed space: my own piss, uncontrollable, flooding my underwear.
Who knows how many hours or days I’ve been in here now. She has robbed me of anything that might mark time. While it flows on as usual outside the room, I am trapped in here. A slow murder.
I no longer attempt to escape. I slump into my own shit. A new piece of Ariah’s story slots into place. Perhaps the six men before me didn’t escape either. How stupid of me never to wonder where they had ended up. Perhaps all of them were addicted like me, even on their day of repentance, surrendering themselves to her fatal experiments. And this is where we have all ended up: in the dark.
I crouch in this clammy and suffocating enclosure, imagining her out there, laughing scornfully, revelling in her hideous face. A pocked face that invites the mirth of maggots. Rotting. Bewitching.
The Well
‘I won’t be home too late.’
‘I wind up in pain when you come back late. A lot of pain.’
‘Yes, Pa. I know. See you later, Pa.’
Dahlia, the youngest daughter, cared for her sickly father. Her siblings survived on her blood, leeches that they were. Their right to movement, procreation, business, labour and leisure – all of it depended on Dahlia’s existence. Beloved daughter, Pa’s little girl, youngest sister to all the siblings. She was the last born, frequently overlooked. And see how powerless he had become: he whose voice had once boomed through the halls of the household, he who could ferret out the trembling lies of his children as they cowered under the table, a tyrant who wielded an iron fist in the name of love. Now he was merely a pensioner. His grey hair stank of pomade and he was helpless without his afternoon nap. His 78-year-old heart was weak and he was so dependent on his daughter that he had a constant need to grasp her hand.
‘Your grip’s too tight, Pa.’
‘Don’t leave me.’
Do you depend on me, or do you refuse to let me go because I’m a brittle hair, easily uprooted from your scalp and swept away? Are you afraid of losing me?
Dahlia was her father’s favourite. Her siblings knew this. When she finished her schooling in the mediocre little town where they lived, they asked her to put off finding a job, to take care of the old man. The former authoritarian hated nursemaids and only wanted his beloved daughter. Come on, he won’t live long. Her siblings shared the burden of financial support, and two years ago she, formally a princess, joined the ranks of the unemployed.
They bought her a wide-screen TV so she wouldn’t get bored. She never complained, even though she couldn’t go out with her friends much, or date. Besides, no suitor had come into her life. Of all the many knights, as yet none had had sufficient vigour to vanquish the father.
‘Men of today are losers unworthy of my daughter.’
The old man didn’t care that his youngest child might hold a different opinion.
In the house there was only the father and daughter, the daughter’s cats and a maid who went home for the afternoon. It was a magnificent house for a small town, inherited from his grandfather, the father of the previous ruler. Ah, he too wielded power; a regent who spent his youth drinking wine with colonial officials. His legacy was a Dutch-era house with a faded terrazzo floor. It had a large storehouse and a deep well. There were many doors. Closed, of course. A symbol of the ancestral kingdom.
One door among them was special to Dahlia, a red door near the storehouse in the darkest corner. Above the door hung cobwebs.
There was a deep secret between Dahlia and the door that she hadn’t divulged to her father or any of her siblings.
One day, she had opened the red door and stepped into a forest. Yes, truly. A forest. She clung tightly to this enormous secret. In the scorching heat of the afternoon – when she couldn’t stomach another TV show or munching her slothful way through yet another bag of potato crisps; when she wearied of her lonely home, far from the gleam of myriad neon lights; or when she was simply sick and tired of every damn thing – Dahlia would sneak into the woods. When she felt a tightness in her chest, the forest offered her plenty of air. Several times, she returned from an excursion on the other side of the door, barely suppressing an urge to scream. Out of fear, out of happiness, out of anger – maybe all three. Anything at all, just not boredom.
Behind the red door, a new world revealed itself to her. Not far from it stood an old, moss-covered well. She peered into it and felt something like an electric shock jolting her out of a century-long slumber. The water in the well was clear and calm but a shadow had appeared on it. The shadow of a face. No. She shuddered. Not a face. There was only a head and eye sockets, holes that led down to the darkest depths. The face had no features; all was emptiness and two holes, ending who knows where.
Dahlia tried to tear her eyes away, her heart racing.
She experienced a feeling more unsettling than horror. A sense of wanting to reach out to the emptiness, to lose herself within it. As she tried to look away, the shadow grew more distinct. Dahlia could make out the creature, from the waist up to the neck. The figure was naked with long, dishevelled hair and breasts. A woman.
But who? Who was this faceless woman, whose eyes dropped away to nothingness?
Dahlia now realised that the shadow followed all her movements. When she touched the water with her right hand, the woman extended her left. As she tilted her head back, those deep eyes vanished. Don’t – Don’t look away. My mirror.
From that moment on, something behind the red door had transformed itself. Was it the well or the forest? Dahlia wasn’t sure but she always came to stare at the shadow. The mirror in her room now seemed to throng with nauseating lies. That dulled glass had become a director of cheap horror films with cheesy but creepy special effects. She hated the face in it. She didn’t want to have a face. Only eyes. Yes, eyes that could see everything. Like the eyes of the woman in the well.
Had someone else also been peering into the well?
The well obsessed her, even after she returned to the outside world. She felt estranged from that world, above all from the body she didn’t want to possess. As she walked the streets in the crowd, her worn-out frame always felt like it was moving against her will. Her body and mind had undergone a separation but even so it was her body, rather than her mind, that remained a concern for those around her. Wrinkles, stretch marks, skin folds, varicose veins, pores the size of potholes. People in her world were crazy about putting these flaws under a microscope, simply for the relief at not suffering from them.
Come Friday night, her friends went out on dates. So did Dahlia. After her father had gone to sleep, she had her own enthralling tryst with what lay beyond the red door.
Sometimes she wanted to step through and never return.
—
‘Do you remember how naughty Adit was?’
A bedtime ritual. Dahlia sat next to Pa, accompanying him as he wandered among sepia-toned memories. A melancholic nostalgia that she knew by heart.
‘Do you remember when he set his report card on fire? He didn’t dare come home until late at night. Your mum and I were worried sick until a neighbour finally brought him back. He arrived in filthy clothes – only the devil knows what he’d been up to – and his face was all sulky. Did he think he could just come and go like a hotel?’
Dahlia remembered her father’s wrath. He whipped Adit with a belt. Twice.
‘I might have been a little hard on him,’ her father admitted. ‘But look at the fruits of my discipline now. Just look at the man Adit has become.
’
A respectable lawyer, one of Dahlia’s key benefactors.
‘And Rama. He wouldn’t have a job at a multinational now if I’d let him keep wasting his time with that amateur band of his.’
Then Sarita, Dahlia recalled.
She wasn’t allowed to utter that forbidden name. Sarita, Sarita. Sarita, who smoked marijuana. Sarita, who slept with the son of her father’s friend. Sarita, who ran away overseas with her beloved.
Secretly, Sarita financially supported Dahlia, too.
‘But you, my little girl, you are the best. Even when you were a baby, you hardly cried, and you were always very obedient,’ he patted Dahlia’s head, as if stroking a bunny.
Lulled by his reminiscences, the old man drifted off to sleep. Dahlia watched his eyes close. Night paves the way for little princesses to engage in their petty betrayals.
For everything that I cannot do like Adit, Rama and Sarita.
Dahlia moved away from her father and tiptoed towards the red door.
She pressed down on its carved handle. The door creaked open. Air surged from behind it, carrying not the stale smell of dust that had settled indoors for too long, but the fresh moisture of dew that formed on leaves at night. Rather than the hardness of the floor, her feet now trod on soft, cold grass. Here was a forest and above it a black sky topped by an eternal rainbow. Crimson, chocolate and indigo blended as beautifully as a gaping wound. Her alternate world – the world behind the door, where the owl never sleeps and the rustling branches create a language of their own.
Ah, welcome back to our forest, child of humankind. Soon the celebration will begin. Look, they have gathered around the campfire.
She hadn’t known of life in the forest. A group of men and women as beautiful as fairies smiled at her. Plant tendrils, twisting like snakes, supplied their clothing.
Come, come, sit here.
She wanted to know what it felt like to be one of them. To dance to music she had never heard, partake of the most mouth-watering fruits, wear a constant smile. But she was reluctant to join – it was as though they spoke a different tongue. Dahlia settled herself on a rock not far away, admiring the festivities.
Apple and Knife Page 8
