by Hanna Alkaf
The moon had draped itself in clouds and shadow, but in the dim light, Suraya could see the small grasshopper shape of Pink transform and grow as he tumbled in midair, and when he landed it was in a crouch right behind the pawang, still stumbling from Suraya’s sudden, unexpected attack, still unable to do much more than pant to try and catch his breath.
Before he could regain his balance, she shoved him again, throwing all her weight behind her shoulder, trying to make herself as heavy and strong as she could.
The pawang stepped back, tripping over Pink’s low, crouching form and tumbling onto his back—straight onto a fresh grave mound.
Immediately, Pink moved to hold him down.
I cannot do this for much longer, Pink said, his breath ragged. And as soon as he is able to speak, the polong will be all over us.
“Hang on, Pink.” Suraya ran to where she could see the ghosts fighting with the pawang’s polong army. “Badrul!” she yelled. “I need a little help!”
It seemed to take no more time than it took to blink for the ghost to glide to her side.
“You heard the lady!” he barked to the grave mound. “Give her a hand, if you please.”
Nothing happened.
The pawang struggled against Pink’s grip, mud seeping into the soft gray cloth of his jubah.
Suraya glanced at Badrul. “What was that supp—”
“Shush,” Badrul growled. “You’ll see. Children, honestly,” he muttered to himself. “So impatient.”
The ground moved.
“There, you see? I told you to wait.”
The pawang looked down, wild-eyed. “What’s happening? What . . .”
But before he could finish, hands had burst out of the dark, damp earth; cold, graying, clammy hands that reached up and around the pawang, gripping him firmly around his arms.
The pawang began to scream.
Badrul spat in disgust. “Look at him, making all that riot. Mangkuk. In my day, we took our punishments like MEN.” And he hitched up his sarong from where it was starting to droop at his waist and turned to march back to the melee, swinging his tree branch merrily along.
“Quick, Pink,” Suraya yelled, “make sure he can’t call his creatures for help!” And Pink used his great hands to shovel dirt into the pawang’s mouth so that he choked and spluttered and could say nothing, nothing at all, as those cold, cold hands drew him onto the dirt, until they heard the crack of his head on a rock, and the hands glided smoothly back into the earth they had come from.
And then there was silence.
“Is he . . . is he . . .” Jing couldn’t seem to finish her sentence, and Suraya shook her head quickly so she wouldn’t have to.
“No! No, of course not.”
He is just stunned, Pink said. Unconscious, he cannot give commands. He cannot harm us.
“What do we do with him now?” Suraya looked at the pawang’s still body with some distaste.
“Maybe we should ask his . . . friends,” said Jing, jerking her head. For all around them, the pawang’s monsters had gathered, staring silently at the body of their former master.
He was never their friend, Pink said quietly. He was cruel. They have no loyalty to him.
“Then maybe they should be the ones to decide his fate,” Suraya said.
As soon as the words left her mouth, there was a loud skittering and a mass of polong came forward, lifted the Pawang’s body, and bore it away. Behind them, the bajang and toyol slunk through the shadows.
“What will they do to him?” Suraya whispered.
They will have their way, Pink replied. The langsuir may flee, as may the bajang and the toyol. But the polongs will set out to look for his blood in a new master. Someone somewhere is about to get a nasty surprise. . . .
High above them, they heard the langsuir-owl screech one last time as she swooped off into the night.
Thirty-Five
Girl
IN THE CEMETERY, nothing moved, not even the insects and animals that usually crept and crawled under cover of the shadows. Pink, Suraya, and Jing sat in a row, savoring the quiet and the cool night air. Suraya didn’t know what was going through her friends’ minds, but her own was filled with the cold dread of words like goodbye and gone and forever, and she couldn’t shake the fear that saying anything at all would bring their inevitable parting even closer.
“Well.” Jing spoke first, breaking the spell. “That was . . . quite a night.”
Suraya had to smile. “Better than going to the movies, huh?”
“Definitely better.”
“Better than Star Wars even?”
“Let’s not go that far.” Jing smiled and nudged Suraya with her shoulder. “I’ll just sit here for a sec, take a breather. You guys go . . . handle your business.”
Pink looked at her. Thank you, Jing, he said quietly.
She stared at him open-mouthed for a second. “You mean you could have just TALKED TO ME this WHOLE TIME?”
I could have. Pink shrugged. But this is the first time I have felt that you are not just her friend . . . but also mine.
Jing’s face broke out into that familiar wide grin. “The feeling’s mutual, buddy.” She rubbed her nose with her thumb, narrowly missing hitting her face with the shovel she still carried. “Oh. You’ll need this.” She pressed it into Suraya’s spare hand, clasping it tight for a moment before she let go. “So I guess . . . I guess this is goodbye.”
Farewell. Pink thought for a second. May the force be with you.
Jing’s delighted laugh rang through the cemetery as she walked away.
Suraya and Pink made their way to the little grave at the very top of the hill.
“This is it, Pink,” Suraya said quietly. “We’re about to find out who you really are. Are you ready?”
For a moment, he didn’t answer. “You don’t have to, you know,” she said, all in a rush. “The pawang is gone now. We have nothing to fear. We could just . . . go back to the way things were! We could be happy again. And besides . . . there’s no guarantee this will even work.”
Beside her, she thought she felt his body tremble, just slightly. You know we need to do this. Or we need to at least try.
“But why?” She was sobbing now; she just couldn’t help it. “Why can’t you just stay with me?”
He laid a scaled hand against her cheek, as he’d done so many times before. It’s hard to live a life weighed down by the dead. And you need to live, Suraya.
She didn’t even try to stop the tears coursing down her cheeks, and he was quiet. Pink always did know when to give her the space to feel her feelings.
When he spoke again, his voice was firm and steady.
I am ready.
Slowly, they approached the neat little grave that sat in the shade of a flowering frangipani tree, only with dark red petals darkening to burgundy centers instead of the pure white ones with the deep yellow hearts from Suraya’s garden. The grave was impossibly, sadly small, its head- and tail stone bearing small cracks and a thick layer of dust. Yet flowers crept along the edges, blooming defiantly in the midst of neglect and decay.
Suraya bent down, hesitantly sounding out the name spelled out in curling Arabic script.
IMRAN, SON OF RAHMAN AND NORAINI.
She sucked in a breath sharply. The world seemed to spin that much faster, so fast she had to sit down before she fell over.
RAHMAN. AND NORAINI.
What is it?
She took a deep breath.
“That’s your name, Pink. Imran.” She pointed it out to him. “And those . . .”
Those . . . ?
“Those are my parents’ names.”
“Suraya?”
She turned her head.
It was Mama. And standing next to her, barely visible and flickering slightly in the dying moonlight, was a ghost. A small woman, Suraya realized, Pink’s words echoing in her head, round and soft with a smile that made her whole face crinkle up and her eyes disappear into two thin l
ines.
But there was another ghost.
And suddenly Suraya understood. She understood it all: her mother’s constant aches and pains; the bow and hunch of her thin shoulders; the sorrow hiding in the depths of her eyes like crocodiles in still water, waiting to pounce; the way she held her own daughter at arm’s length. Because the other ghost was with her mama; a little boy no more than two years old, with a shock of dark hair and huge eyes that sparkled with starlight and fear, who clasped his hands around her mother’s neck as if he would never let go.
Her brother.
Imran.
“How did you know where to find us?”
They knelt beside Pink’s grave—Imran’s grave, her brother’s grave; Suraya’s head swirled with all this new information until it made her dizzy. The witch’s ghost perched daintily on a nearby tree stump, her flowery batik sarong spreading over the roots. Her brother’s ghost stared at her with wary, watchful eyes.
“Your friend’s mother . . . she called me.” Mama’s voice didn’t sound like Mama’s at all; it was cracked, and small, and sad. “She said you two were nowhere to be found, that her daughter wasn’t answering her phone. She said the last place she knew for sure you were was near Gua Musang. I was on my way there when she called again and said you’d gotten money from a gas station near here. Then I knew for sure where you were headed. I knew . . .” Mama swallowed. “I knew what you must have been looking for.”
“Tell me everything, Mama.”
She let out a weary sigh. “Your father had just died,” she began, and her voice creaked like a door that hadn’t been opened in a long, long time. “You were a tiny little baby, and I was exhausted. We came here, to my mother, because I thought she could help me. Help us. I should have known better.”
She paused as though to collect herself. “I knew about her witching—I’d known about it for a long time—but I thought she could put that aside for once and just be there for her family. And anyway, she wasn’t a very good witch.”
“Excuse me!” The witch’s voice was like old leaves and dry riverbeds, and it was filled with outrage.
Mama ignored her. “She tried, but all she could manage were little spells and hexes. You remember that time you insisted you were sick? You threw such a tantrum when we told you that you were perfectly well, the doctor gave you placebo pills. You thought that was what the medicine was called, when it actually wasn’t medicine at all. It was fake, a little lie to make you believe you would get better. Well, that’s the kind of witch your grandmother was. It made people feel good to think her little spells were actually doing what they wanted, and so they paid her money for nothing more than fake pills that made them believe they felt better.”
“Hmmph.” The witch sniffed. “Say what you want, but I helped people. And I made a decent living for us doing it, too.”
“So . . . what happened to my brother?” Suraya was almost afraid to ask; she had to force the words out before she lost her nerve.
“He wandered into the pond and drowned one afternoon while I was sleeping next to you.” She said it fast and forcefully, as if she couldn’t bear the words to linger on her tongue for too long, and the little boy-ghost on her back shivered, as if he remembered the feeling of cool, cool water swirling into his lungs and pushing the air and the life out of him. “My breast was still in your mouth. The sheets were wet with milk when I woke up, my head hammering, knowing immediately that something was wrong.”
Suraya’s tongue felt thick and fuzzy, and her throat ached with unshed tears as she reached out to grasp her mother’s hand in her own.
“I didn’t hear him at all.” Mama’s breaths were short now, and ragged, and choked with sadness. “But he must have made some sound. Right? Surely he would have splashed, or cried, or yelled. I should have heard him.” She massaged her aching shoulders, shifting the boy’s weight from one side to the other as she stared up at the moon. “I blamed myself. And sometimes, because it was easier, I blamed her.”
“I was meant to be watching him.” The witch shook her head, the lines on her face leavened with sadness. “I don’t know how he got away from me. He’d just found his feet. He was a quick one, slippery, like a tadpole swimming downstream.”
“But he couldn’t swim like a tadpole, could he?” There was no anger in Mama’s voice; it was flat and strangely matter-of-fact. “I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand being here, and I couldn’t stand her. I left, taking you with me. I wanted another life, one where nobody knew who we were. I didn’t know what she would do, didn’t even suspect until Jing’s mother told me you were here, back in Kuala Gajah. And then I knew. I knew what she’d done to him.”
“Done to him?” The witch was indignant. “I loved that boy.”
“Then why did you do what you did?” There was anger now, and so much anguish it made Suraya’s heart ache and her toes curl. “Why did you make him this . . . this . . . thing? This monster?” Beside her, she felt a small quiver, and Suraya knew it hurt Pink to hear these words spill from Mama’s lips so easily.
“I thought it would be a way of keeping part of him with me.” The witch’s voice was small, and tired, and somehow older than it had ever been. “A way of keeping him alive. I just followed the instructions. I didn’t know it would make . . . this.”
“You were never very good with recipes.” Mama sniffed, running her sleeve under her nose to clear the snot that trailed from it. “Why didn’t you just get rid of it?”
The witch looked at her, aghast. “You know how I feel about waste. It was there, and it was a perfectly good resource.” She folded her hands primly in her lap. “I made full use of it . . . of him. And I became a very good witch indeed. And . . .” She coughed, and Suraya thought she caught a glimpse of something more behind that prim expression, something soft and warm and altogether more likable. “And I suppose I liked having him around. Even if he wasn’t . . . the him I remembered. I liked having that piece, at least.”
“I’m sorry you ever did it.”
“I’m not,” Suraya said quietly, but with a firmness in her voice she didn’t know she possessed. “He’s the best friend I ever had. In fact, he’s more than that. He’s . . . he’s family.”
“I’m family,” the witch replied testily. “And what’s more, you never even come to see my grave. Young people today, honestly.”
“I didn’t know where your grave even was!”
The witch sniffed. “Excuses.”
Suraya thought of something then, and she drew the marble out of her pocket. “Is this yours?”
There was a flash of recognition in the witch’s eyes. “Gave it to her, didn’t I?” She jerked her head in Mama’s direction. “Sent it in the post. Told her it would help her see her boy, or her man if she wanted. Never even got a thank you note, I’ll have you know.” Her tone was injured.
“I locked it away,” Mama said, her eyes on the grave. She ran her hand gently over his name: IMRAN, etched into the gray headstone. When she spoke again, her words were for Suraya alone. “I didn’t want to see him. My grief was too much for me. To lose two people almost at once. To lose your own child. It’s like losing a part of your heart. And the part that was left hurt too much, so much that I covered it in darkness and did my best to feel nothing at all.” She turned to her daughter, and Suraya tried hard to see the pain in her eyes without flinching. “Can you see what that might do to a person?”
The little ghost around her neck looked at Suraya, and his eyes were wide and dark and scared.
“I can see,” Suraya said, stroking the thin hand she held in her own, and she could. She could see the slope of her mother’s shoulders, bent not just with the weight of the phantom baby that clung to her, but the guilt that wouldn’t let her go, and she chose her next words carefully. “But Mama, broken mothers raise broken daughters. Did you not see how we could have each filled the parts the other was missing? Been stronger, together?”
“I see that now,” Mama whisper
ed. “But at the time, all I could think was I had no strength left for love. I had to use it all for survival. There was nothing left.”
Beside her, so still that she had almost forgotten him, Pink stirred. It is no wonder that I love you as I do, he said. It is because a part of me always recognized you as my little sister.
Slowly, he got up and stood before Suraya’s mother, who seemed not at all surprised to be addressed by this scaled, horned, solemn-eyed beast. You have been carrying this burden for a long time, he said gently, and she nodded, looking up at him with eyes that still glistened with tears. It does not do to cling to the dead and forget the living. Will you let me take it from you?
It took longer this time, but after a while she nodded.
Pink reached up.
The little ghost-boy hesitated.
It is all right, Pink said quietly. It is all right. They don’t belong to us, you see. They belong to each other, just as you and I do.
The ghost-boy thought about this for a second. Then, slowly, he unclasped his hands from around Mama’s neck and let Pink lift him gently into his great, scaled arms.
Mama sobbed as if her heart would break.
Pink knelt down beside her, bowing his great horned head toward her own. You can come and visit, the way you should with your dead, he told her, his voice soft and warm as a hug. And he—I—we—will always be here for you, and glad to see you. But nobody is meant to live their whole lives hanging on to ghosts. Just as he and I must let go, so must you.
And so must I, Suraya realized, and the breath she let out was a long, shaky sigh.
Beneath the tears and the sadness, Suraya thought she saw relief flicker on Mama’s face as she stared up at Pink’s monstrous face and placed a trembling hand on his cheek.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
No, Mama. Thank you.
The pre-dawn sky was the color of a day-old bruise, and the air filled with the steady clink, clink, clink of trowel against dirt.
There was little light to see by, but if you were looking carefully, you might have seen a dark, hulking shape shrink rapidly into a small one, one that looked very much like a grasshopper, on the palm of a little girl’s hand.
