The Girl and the Ghost

by Hanna Alkaf

  Suraya felt her spirits dip as low as the sun in the sky.

  Twenty-Nine

  Ghost

  THEY SAT ON the curb in a row outside the cemetery, first the ghostly form of Hussein, then Jing, Suraya, and Pink each casting three long, thin shadows in the waning sunlight.

  The ghost cleared his throat awkwardly. “So, um. I have no idea what kind of weird scavenger hunt you girls were on, but this was really fun.”

  “This was fun for you?” Jing scratched absentmindedly at the border of where skin met cast, and Suraya nudged to make her stop.

  “I mean. I don’t, uh, get many visitors myself.”

  “Why not?” Suraya’s voice was gentle, and Pink knew how badly she wanted to keep Hussein from hurting. If there was anything he knew from his time with Suraya, it was that she could never bear anyone to feel pain, not even the bullies who had plagued her for so long.

  Pink could see the ghost shrug, trying to put on a cloak of bravado he clearly didn’t feel. “They stopped coming one year, my parents. It’s been a long, long time. My guess is they died, and now they’re buried somewhere else. Somewhere far away from me.”

  Pink’s nonexistent heart broke slightly for this ghost, who ached for a family long gone, and for himself too, though he would never admit it. In her own way, the witch had been family—she had created him, after all, and for a long time she was all he had known. He wished he could say he cared for her more than he did.

  There was silence.

  Then Suraya spoke. “I will come back, you know. To see you. I will.”

  Hussein smiled. “I’d like that very much.” He sighed. “It wouldn’t be so bad if I wasn’t having so much trouble remembering their faces. I remember them in fragments: the smell of my father’s cigars, the pattern on his favorite sarong. The way my mother’s hands felt on my face when she put talcum powder on me before school, the songs she’d sing while cooking in the kitchen. But I can’t for the life of me remember their faces.” He pushed back a handful of ghostly hair. “If only I had a picture or something.”

  A picture.

  The little girl with the lopsided pictures and the lopsided smile.

  The letters, pleading at first, and then suddenly cold. Do not contact us again.

  Pink stiffened. I remember.

  Suraya looked at him. “Remember what, Pink?”

  “What?” Jing was suddenly alert. “What does he remember?”

  The village. The place I was born . . . made. He frowned, trying his hardest to pull it from his memories, turn fragments into something whole, solid, usable. Jambu trees in the garden. A round pond. A blue-domed mosque. And something else. Something about where they lived that always made the witch say . . .

  Elephants never forget, he said.

  “What?”

  Something the witch used to say. It was one of his earliest memories. Light filtering through damp, dark earth, and the witch’s face, creased with smiles and wet with tears. Elephants never forget, and I never want to forget you, she’d crooned.

  “Is anyone else confused?” Jing asked. “Or is it just me?”

  The witch lived in a village with elephants in its name. Gajah.

  Suraya relayed this information to Jing, who pulled out her phone, still dinging incessantly. “That . . . narrows it down a little bit, but not by much. You’d be surprised how many kampungs in Malaysia have gajah in the name.”

  “Try Perak, Jing,” Suraya said. She looked at Pink. “Remember what Mama said before? To the pawang, that time? He asked her about the biscuits, her favorite ones. She said she grew up eating them.”

  A Perak specialty, he called them. I remember.

  Jing jabbed furiously at the screen. “Which one, you think? Batu Gajah or Kampung Kuala Gajah?”

  “Which one has a mosque with a blue dome?”

  There was a pause.

  “Kampung Kuala Gajah,” Hussein said softly.

  Pink, Suraya, and Jing exchanged glances. “How do you know?” Jing said, frowning.

  “I went there once.” The ghost shrugged. “We were on the way back to our kampung for Hari Raya—you know, Aidilfitri with the grandparents and all. My dad likes . . . liked . . . to stop at small villages we’d never been before when we were on long trips like that. Made it like an adventure, you know?” He paused to clear his throat. “There was a great warong near the mosque. Trays and trays of dishes, all still fresh and steaming. Masak lemak pucuk ubi and sambal bilis petai and ikan keli bakar and this huge spread of fresh ulam with the most amazing sambal belacan.” Hussein smiled at the memory. “Anyway, I remember eating and panting a bit because the sambal belacan was proper spicy, and looking up to see that blue dome shining in the sun. We went there when we were done, to pray Zohor.”

  He stopped and sighed, staring up at the painted sky. “I miss my parents. I miss food, too.”

  “No kidding.” Jing rubbed her stomach, which was making strange noises. “That story made me hungry. And also made me miss my mom. Just a teensy bit.”

  And it was at precisely that moment that Jing’s phone began to beep incessantly, like a fire alarm. Hussein’s eyes widened. “What is happening?”

  “It’s my phone.” Jing wore a puzzled expression.

  “That is a PHONE?” Hussein’s mouth hung open in wonder. “It’s TINY!”

  The noise was starting to make Pink’s head hurt. Make it stop that infernal noise.

  “Jing,” Suraya spoke through gritted teeth. “What is happening?”

  “I don’t know. What’s . . . oh.” In the light of the screen, Pink saw her face grow pale.

  “What is it?”

  Jing held up the phone for them to see.

  At first, Pink couldn’t figure out what he was looking at. It looked like a map, the type that reduces buildings and roads to lines and squares. A bright red circle glowed in the center of the map, and the words LOCATING PHONE scrolled over and over again on top of it in a never-ending loop.

  Suraya’s eyes widened. “Is that . . . ?”

  Jing nodded. “She’s using the Find My Phone app to locate us.”

  What does that mean?

  “I don’t know,” Suraya said, her voice shaky with panic. “I don’t have a phone, remember? What does that mean, Jing?”

  “It means she’s using my phone to pinpoint our exact location.” She pushed her sweaty hair back off her forehead and grimaced. “Of all the times for my mother to figure out how technology works . . .”

  Hussein leaned close to Pink. “Kind of glad to be dead at the moment, really. Kids these days seem to have very stressful lives.”

  You are not wrong.

  There was one final, long beep, and then the phone was silenced.

  The two girls looked at each other. Then, slowly, they looked at the screen.

  PHONE FOUND.

  Jing let out a breath. “They’re coming for us.”

  Thirty

  Girl

  “WE HAVE TO get to Kampung Kuala Gajah,” Suraya said, as they walked briskly back to the town center. “Somehow,” she added.

  “Okay, but how though?” Jing said, scurrying after her. “And how quickly can we do it, considering our moms may appear, like, at any second?”

  “Your mom, maybe.” Suraya was still fairly sure her mother had yet to notice she was gone.

  This is hyperbole, Pink said. It would take your mothers at least four hours to arrive at this place, and that is if there were no traffic to hinder them.

  “Pink says you’re overreacting.”

  Jing sighed noisily. “Has he ever heard of dramatic effect?”

  Has she ever considered taking five minutes to just . . . not be herself?

  “Have you two ever thought about not arguing for once?” Suraya didn’t mean to snap, but she was hot and worried and very close to locking the two of them in the cockroach-infested café to work out their differences. “I hate to tell you this, but it is absolutely no fun to be the only person hear
ing both sides of your bickering. We have too much work to do for this nonsense.”

  “But how do we do it if we don’t know what we’re doing?” Jing asked.

  It wasn’t an unreasonable question, which was what made it so hard to hear.

  “First things first.” She stared at the phone in Jing’s hand, now locked and useless. “Ditch your phone.”

  “EXCUSE ME?” Jing clutched the phone to her chest, looking appalled. “I can’t do that! This is an iPhone!”

  Suraya could feel the waves of panic rising higher and higher in her chest. “You have to leave it here, so our mothers don’t know to follow us to Perak!”

  “So why can’t I just SWITCH IT OFF?”

  “Does that even work?” She was sweating now.

  “Of course it does!” Jing threw her arms up in exasperation. “Don’t you know how cell phones work?”

  A sudden lump lodged itself in Suraya’s throat, and try as she might, she couldn’t seem to swallow it away. “You know I don’t.”

  Jing’s face was immediately contrite. “Sorry, Sooz. I didn’t mean it like that.” She sighed and took her glasses off, wiping the smudged lenses on her top. “Look, I just don’t think it’s a good idea to get rid of my phone. What if there’s an emergency?”

  Suraya. She felt Pink lay a spindly leg gently on her cheek. It will be fine. The girl has a point. What if we need the device later on?

  “Fine.” Suraya took a deep, wavery breath. “But it stays off the whole time. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  Ten minutes later, they were walking back toward the center of town.

  “Come on,” Suraya said over her shoulder as she began to walk toward the bus station. “Let’s try and figure out how long it’ll take and how much it’ll c—oof!” Before she could stop herself, she’d walked straight into the shadowy figure who’d stepped into her path seemingly out of nowhere.

  Suraya looked up. It was, she realized, a startlingly familiar shadowy figure.

  The pawang.

  Suraya’s heart lodged itself into her throat.

  “Hello, ladies,” he said, smiling that too-pleasant smile. “Fancy meeting you here. A little far from home, aren’t you?”

  The two girls said nothing.

  “Do your parents know where you are?” He let his glance drift from Suraya to Jing, then back again, slow, casual, and somehow completely unsettling. He bent down, so close to Suraya’s face she could smell the sour staleness of his breath. “I bet you don’t want them to.”

  She stepped back involuntarily, and he smiled that strange, easy smile. “Why don’t you let me . . . take care of you?”

  Just then, Suraya heard a soft voice whisper in her ear. A familiar voice. Hussein’s voice.

  “Run,” it said.

  She didn’t wait to be told twice; she just grabbed Jing’s hand and began to run, thinking of nothing but the roaring in her ears, the feel of Jing’s skin against hers, the way her feet felt as they thudded rhythmically against the pavement, and the very, very important fact that there were no answering thuds behind them.

  “What if he . . .”

  “Don’t look back.”

  They scrambled into the back of an old red-and-white taxi idling by the station, panting hard. The old man who’d been nodding off behind the steering wheel sat up with a startled grunt. “Mau pergi mana?” he asked, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes with one hand.

  “Uncle, can you take us to Kampung Kuala Gajah?” Suraya asked.

  “HAH??” The driver stared at them, open-mouthed. “Aiyo, that one very far lah girl. More than one hour, you know? By the time I come back my wife will be waiting to whack me with a slipper.”

  “It’s an emergency lah uncle,” Jing said, fixing her best imploring look on him. “Please? We can pay you. Our . . . uh . . . our mother is sick, and we have to get to her. We’re supposed to meet our father there.”

  “Mother? You don’t look like her sister also.” He sniffed.

  “Please lah uncle. How will we get there without you?”

  “Please, uncle,” Suraya said. The sobs she’d been trying to keep down caught at her voice and put cracks in it, so that her tears threatened to come pouring through.

  The driver looked at them.

  Then he looked down.

  Then he flung his hands up in the air. “Fine! Fine! But you know what happens when your wife tells you she is making mutton curry for dinner and you better come home and then you DON’T COME HOME?”

  “What?” Jing asked.

  “Pray you never find out,” he muttered darkly as he began to pull out. “May Lakshmi forgive me.”

  As the taxi began to move slowly away from the little village outside Gua Musang, Suraya turned back and looked through her marble . . .

  . . . and saw the pawang struggling to move, his face contorted in a grimace of anger and confusion, as Hussein hung onto his legs for dear life.

  Thirty-One

  Girl

  BY THE TIME the taxi dropped them off, the driver still muttering away about Lakshmi and mutton curry under his breath, night had fallen and the two girls and Pink stood quietly in the town center, taking it all in.

  Kampung Kuala Gajah had two main roads that intersected, along which stood rows of tired-looking shophouses with weathered signs proclaiming their specialties in once-bright colors. The only people in sight were those manning their businesses, and even those were few and far between; the man in the shop proclaiming Photostat, Printing, Binding, Laminating, We Take Passport Photo Also was struggling to bring down the metal shutters and close up, and the aunty presiding behind rows of plump white steamed pau was engrossed in a telenovela playing on her phone, squinting so she could read the subtitles. “Aiyah!” they heard her mutter under her breath from time to time, or, “Wah, like that also can!” Everything else was already closed, and the streetlights themselves seemed dim and hopeless.

  “This is where my grandmother lived?” Suraya wrinkled her nose as she took it all in.

  Pink shrugged his little grasshopper shoulders. The witch wanted to live unnoticed. What better way than to lay down roots here, a town that is perpetually a stop and never the destination?

  Jing was surveying the contents of her wallet, a resigned look on her face. They’d stopped at a gas station so she could get some money from the ATM there with the debit card her mother had given her for emergencies, one she’d kept hidden at the bottom of her shoe. They’d had no choice; the taxi had to be paid for somehow. “That’s it,” she said sadly. “It’s only a matter of time before my mother thinks to check the card activity, and then I’m basically dead.”

  Suraya slung her arm over her friend’s shoulder. “Then we’d better make this count.”

  It didn’t take long to find the witch’s house, just down the street from the mosque. It was a small, solidly built wooden house with a green tin roof, fat mosquitoes buzzing around jambu trees so weighed down with unpicked fruit that their boughs dipped toward the ground, and just behind the house, a perfectly round pond, its surface barely visible beneath a thick layer of fuzzy green scum. It had also clearly not been occupied since the witch had died; the door was falling off its hinges, and when Suraya peeked inside, she saw cobwebs stretching from corner to corner.

  This is it, Pink said, his voice low. This is the house where the witch died.

  In the darkness, something scurried away out of sight, and Jing jumped.

  “I hate rats,” she whispered.

  Suraya didn’t like them much either, but the desire to understand the grandmother she never knew, this strange woman whose blood she shared, won out over the urge to turn and run. She pushed the door open and stepped in.

  The windows were covered in a thick layer of dust, but the light from the sole street lamp outside still fought its way in, and Suraya could just make out the outlines of furniture. There wasn’t much of it. The entire house was a single room, and besides a narrow bed by the window, a c
upboard, and a desk with a single chair, the room was bare.

  Right there, Pink said. Right on that bed. That is where she took her last breath.

  Suraya gulped. “Has nobody lived here since my grandmother?” In the stale, musty air, her whisper carried like a shout.

  Nobody wants to live in a cursed house.

  “This house is cursed?”

  No. But she did a lot of cursing in it. Both kinds.

  Suraya looked all around her and tried to imagine the Pink she knew here within these four walls: laughing at some silly joke she’d made, hopping onto her shoulder to get a better look at whatever she was drawing, dozing in the sun as she turned the pages of whatever book she was reading, whispering stories to her under the covers. But she couldn’t. This just didn’t seem like a place that was made for joy. And no matter what Pink called himself, no matter how dark a spirit he insisted he was, Suraya knew he had joy within him. She’d seen it firsthand.

  Sighing, she reached into her backpack for her flashlight. Beside her, Jing coughed and coughed and coughed. “Dust in my throat,” she wheezed, her eyes watering. “I’m going outside.”

  “Okay,” Suraya whispered. She ran her fingers along the edge of the desk, grimacing at the dust that blackened her fingertips, and opened the single drawer. Things jingled and rattled as she rummaged through—bits of broken candle, stray coins.

  From the chair where he perched, Pink watched her. Are you all right?

  “What happened?” Suraya sank down into the chair, displacing a cloud of dust that made her sneeze. “Why did my mother leave? Why didn’t my grandmother try and find her? I don’t understand.”

  If there is anything I have learned from observing humans, Pink said, it is that families are complicated things.

  “I always wanted to know about my family,” Suraya said quietly, and her voice was small and sad. “But all I’ve learned of my grandmother so far is that she was a horrible, mean person. And I have her blood. What does that say about me?”

  It says that the most beautiful blooms come from the darkest soil.

  Suraya took a deep breath to steady herself for the next question. “Do you think my mama knew? I mean, I know she knew her mother was a witch. But do you think she knew just how bad it all was?”