A World of Horror, page 3
THE MUSICIANS AND THE STAGE HANDS joined us for a simple supper. They regaled us with tales of their travels around our island, their homes back in Indonesia. They did not speak of the dalangs who worked magic behind the linen screen, neither did the mysterious ones make an appearance for food.
I waited for the tiny space we called home to be filled with the buzzing snores of my family and neighbors before I crept away. There was still light in the tent for the dalangs. They must have been making good money to be burning kerosene deep into the night. There was no guard. The other members of the troupe were splayed out on the ground on rough mats, the more senior members putting up with whichever families had room to spare.
My bare feet made no sound as I snuck into the tent. The canvas walls seemed to conceal an expanse that the tent’s external footprint did not suggest. It was hard to tell the size of the place. Baskets and boxes piled from ground to ceiling turned the space into a maze, and clothes drying on ropes obscured my line of sight. There were lamps dangling from the ceiling at regular intervals, but the piles and pillars of the place made the entire tent a shifting kaleidoscope of shadows and light.
I found a basket full of the dalangs’ puppets, carved out of cured leather, held at the joints by pins of brass, supported at the limbs by copper rods. But they weren’t the well-loved tools of a master. Rot darkened the leather, the subtle carvings eaten away by mold. The pins and rods were a creeping mass of verdigris. I heard something, a subtle chittering, a sigh. I turned. There was no one behind me. But there was something new: Cast on the walls of the tent was the exquisite shadow of a puppet—one of the demons—hideously glaring with its deformed face and clawed hands. I looked for a source of light but could not find the puppet that cast said shadow.
The night was warm, humid, but my sweat was cold enough to make me shiver. I hurried onward, only pausing long enough to peer back at the shadow. It seemed like a trick of the light, but the cursed thing seemed to have tilted its head after I passed it, as if to favor me with a quizzical look. I turned a corner and came face to face with another shadow, this one a fearsome warrior, brandishing a pair of curved blades, his armor intricately patterned. Still, there was something wrong with it. I didn’t figure it out until I got closer and cast my own shadow over the dark figure. There was nothing between the shadow and I. The light was behind me. Nothing was casting the shadow. Then the lips of the figure turned upward in a leer.
I would love to say that it was courage that brought me forward, but I am old and care little for the admiration of others. I pushed forth because the figure of the demon was still behind me somewhere. The warrior reached for me, a shadow without a body. The questing tip of a sword found my leg, not the flesh and blood leg that shivered as I squeezed by the creature, but its flat black twin on the ground. I felt the cold kiss of steel across my thigh, hissing at the frozen touch. My trousers had been parted cleanly, my fingers found a speck of blood oozing from my leg. Panic drove me deeper into the den.
A step and a turn around a corner brought me to the heart of the structure. Like a spider in a web, the dalang sat at the center of his maze. He was a wizened little man, perhaps not much taller than I. The elements had dried him out, his skin so much like the hard leather of the abandoned puppets. And, like the abandoned puppets, he appeared to be rotting. His hair grew in patchy clumps, hanging limply from a scalp spotted with age. Wrinkled lips pulled back to reveal blackened gums and a mismatched collection of brown teeth.
“Finally the burglar shows himself. You were louder than a rutting buffalo.”
His hands were still busy with his work. In front of him, barely two paces from me, was a large flat board of wood, so bleached by the sun that it was whiter than bone. On it, pinned down by a collection of sharp wooden dowels, was a squirming black figure in the shape of a man but half the size. I watched as the dalang applied a sharp tool to the flat, black thing and teased out a small fleck of darkness. He put the squirming fragment into his mouth and chewed hard, as though munching on dried cuttlefish. The thing quivered, and I imagined a high pitched keening, beyond the range of my hearing. It was another shadow, like the warrior on the wall a moment ago.
“Oh. Now you’re quiet, boy. Interrupt my work and just stand there mute as a palm tree. Let me take a look at you.”
He set down his tools and groaned as he rose to his feet, only pausing long enough to reach up and pluck a lamp from its perch above. As he moved out of the way, I saw something else. Hidden behind him was a cage made from the same pure white wood as the low table. In the cage was a shape, dark and the size of a large dog or perhaps a small child. It turned its head to face me, having no face that I could discern although there was something there, a ghost of the familiar.
He approached. I retreated. I had no intention of letting him get close. I cast a glance backward and came to a dead stop. The demon and the warrior were both behind me, and they had brought friends. I circled to my side. Perhaps there was another way out behind the dalang. He watched, his dark eyes shiny with amusement.
“Providence favors me with a happy problem. I needed only one child but now I have two. I will eat well this week, it seems.”
I knew for certain then that he had, by some dark art, stolen the shadow from Aishah—the little daughter of the headman—and stuffed it in that cage. He would do the same to me. And then, the table awaited us both. I wondered who the other shadow had belonged to, some child like me perhaps, from another village? The dalang looked at me with no more emotion than a butcher surveying a piece of meat. I held his gaze, shaking slightly. He was a snake and I was a monkey. Our battle was not fought with nails and fangs, but in a contest of wills between our eyes. It was all that prevented that snake of a man from lunging and crushing the air from my lungs with his coils.
“I will call out and the people from the kampung will come save me.”
It was a sign of desperation and shame to cry for my parents. I was more deeply afraid than I’d ever been, even when I’d once stared down the snout of a mother boar I’d startled in the jungle. More of the black things appeared, the entire cast of the wayang from earlier in the evening, and more besides. They leapt and danced, their hungry cries a high pitched buzzing like flies over a bloated corpse.
“Call them. Call them all,” the dalang said. “The only thing you will achieve is the deaths of all those you hold dear.” He grinned, showing a mouthful of rotting teeth. I’d gotten far enough around him to be next to his work table and have Aishah’s shadow at my back. I snatched one of his cutting tools and pointed it at him. If anything, his grin got wider.
“Bravery! Good. Perhaps I should make a warrior out of you. I can always use spare warriors. That knife will break before it pierces my skin. I have them made out of the bones of a young garuda, sharpened on onyx and ebony. It cuts things far finer than flesh and bone. Now, enough of this.”
And the shadow puppets surrounded me. Their eyes shifted, alternating glaring at me and looking back toward their master. There was something in that look I found familiar . . . Not just looking for an order, but something else.
The dalang barked a command, in a tone so low and guttural that it seemed dredged from his belly with fish hooks. The creatures around me hesitated, seeming reluctant to pounce. For all their fury and venom, they had been children like me once. The dalang’s face twisted, the grin swallowed by deep fury. He held his lamp at me, and the shadows mewled piteously, climbing over each other to flee the light. He repeated his order and I felt a sharp pain in my left arm, ice stabbing straight to my bones. One of the shadows, braver than the rest, had speared me through the forearm. Not my flesh and blood arm, but the shadow it cast on the ground. I tried to pull away but my arm was as rooted to the spot as surely as if a spear of metal and wood had pinned me to the wall.
The dalang scuttled closer, the approach of his lamp sending the shadows fleeing to the safety of dark corners, from where they watched their master with narrowed eyes. “Ha. Now, shall I start with you or the girl? The night is half done, and I’ll need to begin if I’m to finish anything before daybreak.”
He began to whistle through his broken teeth, a tuneless ditty. He didn’t care about me. He didn’t care about Aishah. He didn’t even care for his shadows. The sheer callousness made me sick, along with the thought of never seeing my family again. Would there be pain? Would it hurt when he cut my shadow from my body? Even worse, would I care when I was nothing but a flat shadow puppet myself? The death of my mind frightened me most, to be reduced to one of those senseless, gibbering things.
The dalang turned to look through his tools, fingering a selection of long and wicked-looking bone knives. I gripped the tiny carving knife in my hand, with an edge so exquisite that it could cut shadow; the tiny implement was no threat to my adversary, and the other shadows were too many. But there was something it could do—
I bent down and touched the knife above where the spear pinned my shadow, feeling the razor edge of it on my skin.
Knuckles white, I bit down on my cheek and sliced. The pain flashed white behind my eyes and the world spun for a heartbeat. The dalang started when he heard the clatter of my knife on the floor, but he turned too late to stop me from crashing into him.
My left arm was numb, useless. The dalang was surely stronger than I. But I didn’t mean to fight him. The shock of the impact and the desperation of a cornered animal gave me the advantage I needed. When we both stood back upright, I was holding the lamp. I had but a moment. The dalang was already taking a step toward me, murder in his eyes and wielding a blade so thin and sharp that it was nearly invisible. He screeched out orders in that strange tongue. The shadows didn’t move, the lot of them holding back, but it was only a matter of time before they obeyed. The light would keep the shadows off me, but the dalang was another problem.
I swung the lamp as hard as I could, smashing the glass on the edge of one of the many crates around me. I saw the understanding in the dalang’s eyes through the flicker of the burning wick, the whites suddenly showing as I pursed my lips and blew. The flame went out.
There was a bullock cart driver in the kampung once, a fat and cruel man, who stank of alcohol even before the midday meal. He drove his bullock with a long reed switch, stinging the rump of his animal even when it was going in the right direction. One day, the bullock driver fell and the switch was lost to him. He was still floundering about in the mud when the bullock put one heavy hoof on his forehead and smashed his skull. There is no creature so dull as not to understand love and hate. Not a bullock. Not even the shadows. And I had taken away the switch from the dalang.
I felt my way to the cage in the darkness, the shadow creatures swarming around me. The dalang cursed and swore, striking out with the wicked knife he had. I found the catch after a moment’s fumbling. The shadow of the girl clung to me as I stumbled out of the dalang’s tent, clutching my useless arm. Before we had made it halfway back to our houses in the kampung, the screams had already started.
***
“AND THEN WHAT?” asked Isa, clearing his dry throat before forming the words. He’d spent the latter half of the story with his mouth hanging open.
“They never found the dalang. Or the shadows. The troupe packed up and left, whispering dark things about the missing man. The girl woke up later that morning and remembered nothing.”
A voice came from behind them. “Are you filling the boy’s head with nonsense again?”
The words were harsh, but Isa’s grandmother’s tone was warm. She shuffled into the room, bearing a tray with two tall glasses, the cool drinks already sweating in the heat of the afternoon. She set them down on the coffee table between the two.
“No, Nenek. Atuk was telling me about the last wayang kulit he saw in the kampung.”
His grandmother frowned with the effort of recollection. “I don’t remember any wayang kulit in our kampung,” she said finally.
“Of course not. You were sick with fever and senseless for two days.”
Aishah kneaded the muscles of Sulaiman’s neck from behind. The old man sighed.
Isa picked up the cool glass and took a long sip of the icy cold bandung, a mixture of rose syrup and sweet milk. He set it back on the table and wiped his mouth. “He told me that he saved you from a monster and how he lost his arm.”
His grandmother’s eyes twinkled with mirth. “Oh did he now? He lost the use of his arm doing nothing more heroic than falling out of a coconut tree as a boy, or so his mother told the whole kampung.”
“Don’t go spoiling all my stories, Aishah. The boy is still of an age to believe in monsters and bravery.”
“He’d be better off doing his homework. Finish your drink, Isa. Your parents will be back from work soon.”
“Yes, boy. Do as your Nenek says. Books are important now. You may not always be stronger or faster than the monsters around, but you can always be smarter.” His grandfather gave him a conspiratorial wink before slowly easing himself up out of his chair with his one good hand, his other paralyzed arm swinging uselessly.
Isa nodded and smiled back. Stories were stories after all, just like on the television. But he could be smart when he needed to, to see things that others missed. Like how, when his grandfather’s left arm dangled by his side for one fleeting moment, it cast no shadow.
L CHAN hails from Singapore, where he alternates being walked by his dog and writing speculative fiction after work. His work has appeared in places like Liminal Stories, Futuristica: Volume 1, Metaphorosis Magazine, and The Future Fire. He tweets occasionally @lchanwrites.
THINGS I DO FOR LOVE
Nadia Bulkin
Author Nadia Bulkin describes her fiction writing as “socio-political horror, or, scary stories about the world we live in,” and the following is terrifying indeed, in all terms of place, belief, and circumstance.
Asih, Hasyim, Mas Tjapto, Murtawan, and Panggih live in the same Indonesian village, on the muddy banks of a foul, gray river. But as alike as their lives might be imagined, each is an indelible expression of hope, of fear, and of tragedy, driven by how their lives intersect, and how events are set in motion by as diabolical and otherworldly a device as a simple whisper.
Things I Do for Love was the last story that I acquired for this anthology, and it’s one of the best, which goes to prove any number of time-honored adages.
***
ASIH HAS BEEN SICK FOR TEN DAYS, or at least, that is what they are telling her little sister. Poor sprite is too young, they think, to learn that malice is real; that whatever happens in the dirt of a schoolyard is nothing compared to the things adults will do to hurt each other. But Asih did not raise up her little sister to be an over-sensitive coward, and when the child twists the doorknob and steps into her muggy bedroom, Asih is pleased to welcome her with a mouthful of rotting teeth.
They call it a “curse,” and that you “fall” into it helpless and startled, like a house collapsing unexpectedly into a sinkhole, like the knees of a deer buckling as the bullet knits into its hip. This implies your innocence. This implies you were betrayed. This implies that no part of you crawled toward the dark on your hands and knees like a lizard looks for shade, like a termite looks to nest. This implies that “falling”—e.g., to fall in love—isn’t the one thing that everybody wants. As if your bloody, bleeding heart doesn’t crave a void.
“Don’t be scared,” comes tumbling out from between the bleeding gums and blackened enamel, barely discernible through the tongue’s dead flesh, “all of this is nothing.”
“Rendi says that Mas Tjapto’s making you sick,” says her little sister, nervously chewing on her finger. “I asked him why. He said he didn’t know.”
Asih doesn’t remember how snarling Mas Tjapto, always sitting on his porch in a ratty sarong with a cigarette that never seems to ease his mood, was drawn into the shadow, the rot. But she knows it doesn’t matter. The shadow has taught her that much. Mas Tjapto was always going to be taken apart, whether by an angry mob or lung cancer or brooding Mt. Merapi. “Mas Tjapto” was nothing more than a particular carbon configuration that had mistaken its fleeting sentience for power.
Asih has learned a lot since she slid under the shadow. Including: the look on her aunt and uncle’s faces when they peeked into her room, having been compelled by familial obligation and grotesque curiosity to make the drive from Surabaya. Including: the way her friends sound when they are frightened, not just afraid of failing a test or being late for dinner or even of having a rock thrown through their heads when the town is rioting, but truly frightened for the purity of their souls, and the way that fear is warped by the closed wooden door that everyone foolishly hopes will keep Asih’s “sickness” contained. Including: that there is only the infinite and the irrelevant, and nothing in between. Including: that the origin is the end and the cause is the effect. Including: there is no time, because there is no sequence. Including: that every structure and system and shape we worship is impermanent, mutable, changeable into something better but usually something worse—praise be to God the Unholy. Even cells, even mitochondria, even protein. We hang together only by a thread. That is something her aunt and uncle still need to learn. And learn they will, someday.
“Maybe Mas Tjapto knows how to make you better, too.”
The thought is so absurd that Asih begins to laugh—a guttural, primeval predator’s laugh that needles under the skin and right into the nerves, blacking out the world—and by the time she is done, her little sister is gone and the only motion in the room is once again the softly-whipping overhead fan, the gently-pulsing walls.
Asih tosses her head in her sweat-soaked bed, panting softly, only faintly aware of the sensation of being vigorously turned inside out. She smells blood dripping from her little sister’s finger. She hears a noise from somewhere very far away, coming from just inside her head. Like a whimpering dog, or an airplane in a nosedive. Someone is dying. Just one of one hundred fifty thousand today. Six thousand every hour. One hundred every minute. One of two, this very second.
