A World of Horror, page 4
***
THE KIAI, HASYIM, has his head in his hands. He can’t stop thinking about skin being peeled by fire, about muscle being cut and bones being split, about blood rushing forth to greet the day. He can’t stop imagining the pain. There is something to be said for military efficiency, Hasyim is realizing. Surely the poor saps being killed now would rather take a bullet from a soldier’s gun than be dismembered alive by a baying mob. That is one thing they have lost since losing the General; one of many small mercies they didn’t realize were mercies at the time.
“Things can always get worse,” as Mas Tjapto used to say.
Hasyim first heard this earthly truth three years ago, after one of the village’s most devout women—Ibu Hartini, a farmer’s wife, mother of five—went to the dukun instead of the mosque to fix her ruptured marriage. The thought of a woman who had always had the utmost faith in Allah as the arbiter of the One True Plan turning to magical incantations to curse her husband and his lover had given Hasyim heart palpitations; he saw the whole village tumbling off a cliff into the blazing fire of Jahannam. He tried complaining to the mayor, but Murtawan just sipped his tea and told him they had to “sort this out like grown-ups”; he tried waiting for the dukun to come to town, but of course the dukun wouldn’t come near a pesantren, and he ended up marching down to the busted-up little house by the river to see the busted-up little man himself. It was raining, and he had to go wading through the muddy backyard to find him, passing a broken chicken coop and what looked like a broken bird cage. He did not ask why the dukun was throwing tiny bones into the river.
“Waduh,” Mas Tjapto said without turning his head. “The honorable kiai, in my simple little home. What have I done to deserve such an honor?”
“Shouldn’t you already know?” asked Hasyim. “I thought you were a psychic.”
“And I thought kiai could walk through the rain without getting wet.”
Hasyim had suddenly become aware of how cold he was. “I cannot stop you from selling people your solutions,” he said, teeth chattering, “and I clearly cannot stop people from coming to you for help. But I can make life difficult for you, Mas Tjapto, more difficult than you can imagine.”
“You should be thankful that you’re sitting so pretty in your little pesantren, my good kiai,” said Mas Tjapto, and poked a hole in a small egg with a needle. “Things can always get worse.” When he turned his head he was grinning, probably because he knew that sounded like a threat, and not even the most popular dukun could threaten a kiai. At least not back then. There was order back then. “For all of us. We are all just trying to get by.”
A small mercy. Hasyim was raised to be kind. In the half-light he could see the lines on Mas Tjapto’s face, the lines of years spent in what the old dukun no doubt thought was twisted service to the village. And then Hasyim saw himself withered and wizened, begging a younger guru for a small mercy. The fire in his heart cooled to a simmer. So he said, “I’ve come to offer you a compromise. Perhaps you could consult me before you prescribe them a solution. Perhaps we could work together. I know we both love this community . . . ”
“Pah. I don’t love this community,” said Mas Tjapto, and drank the egg. “Full of liars and thieves and idiots. But this community loves me, yes, or thinks it does, anyway. For now.”
“Everyone has weaknesses,” Hasyim agreed. “Who among us but Allah is perfect.”
Mas Tjapto snorted and threw the egg shells into the river. Hasyim hoped he was not implying that he was, indeed, as perfect as Allah, but in the months to come he would learn that Hasyim did not think anyone was perfect—not himself, not Allah, certainly not the General. He was not sure which talk disturbed him more. “Please, Mas, don’t speak like that,” he would whisper as local cops strolled idly by their favorite warung, but Mas Tjapto would laugh and say they couldn’t be held hostage by what he called “the curtain”—the illusion of omnipotence. Fear will kill you before God or the General can. He used to say that, too.
And now the General is gone. And God is standing back, somewhere in the sun-kissed clouds, saying, sort this out yourselves, and Mas Tjapto is dead—whether burned alive or dismembered or decapitated or simply bludgeoned until broken down into blood and matter, Hasyim does not want to know. The curtain has fallen, and it will take them all with it. Reformasi, they call it. Reformasi total! But reformasi into what . . . ?” No one ever seems to answer that question—no one seems to answer any questions anymore—and now all Hasyim knows is the thought that worms in like a snake and turns to stone in his belly: You’re next.
The boys of the pesantren lean forward. They have been anxiously awaiting his instructions since Parno ran in with the news that the dukun had been killed by a black-clothed “ninja assassin.” In the old days he would have called the police or the mayor, but Murtawan is claiming weakness (“in the face of all the danger”) and the police have been bought; so the pesantren must save itself. Some are too young to help—no, they are all too young, and their parents entrusted him with their sons’ education—but everything is broken now. Reformasi total. Suddenly he understands: no mercies, big or small. Just survival.
“These are frightening times for everyone. I know it feels like everyone has lost their minds. The most important thing . . . the only thing . . . we need to do is protect this school,” Hasyim says. “Do you boys understand?”
They nod. The younger ones don’t understand, not really. But the older ones do.
***
MAS TJAPTO HAS MET many deadly things in his lifetime. About a hundred ghosts; fifty highly-poisonous scorpions, beetles, and snakes; a green-eyed emissary of the Queen of the South Seas (though not Nyai Roro Kidul herself); three angels; two zabaniyya; and at least five separate species of jinn. The angels are the worst—placid, sanctimonious assholes who use their supposed proximity to God to justify the objectively terrible things they do. Jinn, at least, make no attempt to hide their evil. Jinn don’t arrange tinsel military parades for themselves; jinn don’t call themselves The Exultant, The Triumphant, The Providential. But jinn will make you rip your own face off if they get angry, and a small part inside Mas Tjapto is surprised that after all the many monsters he has known, he will die at the hands of a fifty-year-old carpenter with a hammer.
He likes to think that one of the jinn he has known is behind this—one of the literally bull-headed, quick-to-temper ones that he used to be very good at tricking, when he was a young psychic—that it snuck inside the carpenter’s daughter when she wasn’t looking and made her flail like a rabid dog; that it planted the seed in her father’s mind that poor old Mas Tjapto was to blame; that it was now watching, with sick satisfaction, as her father clubbed poor old Mas Tjapto to death. But this is not real, and every downward swing of the hammer—infused as it is by the stench of the carpenter’s homelife, the carpenter’s broken heart—reminds him that this is not a scent he recognizes. Whatever is inside that girl, it isn’t about him. He’s going to die, and it isn’t about him.
“I didn’t curse your daughter,” he gurgles through the warm blood rushing down his throat—where has it all come from?—though his ears are ringing so badly that he does not think he will hear his attacker’s response. “What has your daughter done to earn a curse from me? Nothing.”
But that’s bullshit. As if his curses come with any strings like righteousness attached. Well, no, there is a string—one single golden string—and that string isn’t money, like all the village idiots around here said, but power. Since his grandparents first discovered that his dark little wishes could actually maim livestock and sicken classmates—try it again just a little, just a touch—it is the string of power that has jerked him to-and-fro like a wayang puppet. His mother warned him that it would make him nothing more than a loaded gun, a weapon to make the strong even stronger, and she was right, of course, but by the time he grew old enough to understand that, it was too late. Every assassination, every illness, every madness, every thrust of his psychic engine seemed to take him around another corner in a maze so large and so complex that he couldn’t possibly remember how to get out.
The fucking price. He’s known for years he was speeding toward it, and for the last few months he’s been smelling it like the stink of death, lurking around corners. Not even the foulness of the river could mask it.
And because it’s bullshit, the carpenter keeps hitting. A little bit harder now. Mas Tjapto has always been lacking in the art of soothing the soul. All the grieving mothers, the worried fathers, the libretto-singing love-struck choir that believes nothing can eclipse this pain, nothing—the only thing he ever tells them is: things can always get worse. It’s the only solace he believes in. Even now he believes it: I could always be dead. Then his vision blurs and a blackness rolls up inside his eyes, and when the world returns the carpenter is saying, “Release her.” Something is crawling up the wall behind him—a gecko?—no, bigger. Off to the right, glowing diamond eyes are hovering in the darkness of his kitchen. Fitting that the vultures should gather to watch.
“I didn’t curse your daughter,” he repeats, more of a whisper now. He tries to swallow; he fails. Ever more viscous blood comes up instead. Either his vision is shaking or the carpenter is, but either way, he decides he owes this desperate man, at least, the truth. “I can’t release her. Your daughter isn’t cursed. She’s . . . The light from the lamp in the corner splits and the two progeny-lights circle and cross each other’s paths like a pair of flying leyak, “ . . . inhabited.”
The carpenter still hasn’t taken off his mask but now it’s clear that he’s tempted, because why not let the asshole see the wrath in his face if murder’s his only option? Well, maybe all that’s deserved. Not for that sixteen-year-old demon-possessed know-nothing Asih, whom he never touched psychically or otherwise. But for the others. The journalist, the activist, the doctor, the lawyer, the politician, the student, the teacher, the anonymous endless barrage of bodies that floats slowly down the river outside his house every night.
For them. He dies for them.
***
THE CARPENTER SLOWLY trudges home, hammer in hand. He has wrapped the tool, now weapon, in the black mask that he tore out of a black scarf, because he couldn’t breathe with the mask on. The itchy, choking heat took him back to a childhood nightmare about being buried alive—wrapped in a white sheet and buried alive in a wooden box, the better to rot him with—and the warm blood spatter only made it worse. So now he is walking home without his disguise, confident that nothing matters anyway. Maybe he will be caught. Maybe he will be dragged through the streets by his hair and his heels to the one flickering lamp post and torn apart by a mob of other masked men in torn black scarves, all of whom are trying to unstick curses laid upon their own sick sixteen-year-old daughters.
Or maybe nothing will happen to him. Maybe he will walk home and live the rest of his life in a still, silent peace before succumbing to a heart attack. He is not sure which outcome he prefers. Because either way, there is a little worm chewing through his heart, a blind and deaf little worm that is making him doubt that his daughter has been saved. He has felt it in there since he left the dukun’s house—worming around, eating up muscle, making holes. Whispering: how weak the flesh; how small the spirit. When he hears this, tears well. The mayor promised him, as much as a politician can promise anything: he promised him, with a squeeze of the hand and a tearful stare into the eye, that this was his last best resort. “The sickness dies with the poisoner,” the mayor whispered. “But please, you do not need to do that. Mas Tjapto will listen to reason. I know he will.”
Then he thinks he sees a neighbor standing in the middle of a yard, looking over a concrete wall at him. He pauses, takes another look. The sob building in his throat is momentarily hushed in the presence of what he knows in his molecules is not a neighbor. He looks again, but now the “neighbor” is gone.
The gnawing starts up again. It is getting louder, he realizes, the closer he gets to his house. He winces, puts his hand to his heart, and then hears someone behind him whisper his name: “Panggih!”
Of course he does not look back. He is not a fool. He remembers telling his own daughters the story of the boy who looked back when he heard his name called on a dark and lonesome road. Asih was ten, starting to grow into the snappy teenager she would become. Indah was four, sitting on his knee. The dying sun drenching their faces crimson, the crickets’ chirping almost loud enough to feel. Knowing it would be night soon. “And do you know what he saw?”
“No.”
“Panggih!” Louder and more urgent now. Like someone tugging on his shirt sleeve. Like Asih or Indah tugging on his shirt sleeve. Daddy what did he see? He tightens his grip on the bundled hammer and keeps walking.
“Panggih!” It’s almost a yell, and the fear it kick-starts is primordial, animalistic. His house finally comes into view and he breaks into a sprint for the last thirty steps—fumbling with the fence latch, hitting the door shoulder-first, falling into the darkness, slamming the door shut behind him—and only after he has safely shut out the world does the smell hit him. A strange rankness. Like rot wrapped in flowers.
His first thought is of Asih—how he clenched his heart around her name and her last innocent smile as he brought the hammer down on her torturer, how weak the flesh—but her door is closed, her room is dark. So he hurries to the other bedroom instead and sees his wife and littlest daughter asleep, limbs wrapped around each other. His pounding heart is searching for relief, but all he sees when he blinks is the dukun’s body—head now less of a head than a bowl—splayed where he left it in that house by the river. That sob he’s kept swallowed rolls back up his throat as the truth hits him like a sneaker wave that almost knocks him down. How small the spirit.
“Daddy.”
That scent again. Sickly sweet. Thin arms, cold with fever-sweat, wrap around his neck, pressing gently on his esophagus but not hard enough to choke, even though something about her brittle chicken bones almost feels strong enough to do so. When she was little, she broke her ankle running through the woods from some old long-haired woman that the neighborhood children said lived in the trees, looking for lonely babies to steal.
“He said it would release you. He said the sickness dies with the poisoner.”
“What did he see, Daddy? When he looked behind him?”
Pressure of a force he’s never felt before tightens his throat. For a second his eyes blur, and when they focus again all he can see is the two bodies on the bed. How peaceful they look. How still.
“Did he see a chasm open up behind him where the world used to be?”
So still.
***
THE MAYOR, MURTAWAN, misses surfing. He grew up an hour from Plengkung Beach, before the Americans discovered the bay in 1972 and named it G-Land, before the surf camps and the custom beer holders and the speedboats from Bali ferrying in Australians by the dozen—when it was just locals on handmade longboards and the occasional wandering white man with a past and a painted fiberglass board, and when he had a father that used to teach him how to spot good waves rising, how to paddle fast, how to stay balanced. How to look at the wave not as a source of terror but as a vehicle, as a pair of angel wings. Not to look down at the fragility of a liquid floor but forward to the sparkling beach. How to ride danger to Paradise.
He yells for his assistant, voice cracking with sleep. He likes to beat the sun in to work—that hour before dawn when the rest of the village is still floating in a deep lull is the best time to work. Mas Tjapto taught him that. He did learn a few things from the dukun over the past ten years, since he was first elected mayor and introduced, by Ibu Hartini, to their resident “spiritual advisor.” Even then, Mas Tjapto looked like he’d been through several knock-out rounds with the Devil, which immediately informed Murtawan that he was a survivor. An aligner. One who knows how to protect himself by jumping quickly from rock to rock. Even if the rock sinks in his wake.
There is one thing that his father did not teach him about surfing, but that he learned on his own in G-Land, getting bumped off waves by older boys, getting thrown off his board even: there is only room for one to ride the crest. Only room for one survivor. And what was the thing Mas Tjapto said to him last month? “Everybody has to pay the price, Pak,” and from that tone burst forth all the things they’d done together: challengers sickened, bureaucrats blinded, coffers seized. The dukun had become surly in his old age. Started mumbling about God and comeuppance and not Paradise but Hell. Getting ready to jump to another rock.
His assistant—twenty-five years old, looking nervous because the entire country has been thrown into the middle of a fast-breaking wave without a board and everyone is craning their necks backward, just trying to keep their mouths above a thrashing water line, because the world is full of goats in need of a shepherd—hurries in, wiping his eyes. “Yes, Pak Murtawan.”
“How is Mas Tjapto?” He picks up a pen and flips open his diary book. “Have you checked?”
“It happened late last night,” his assistant says, his mouth hanging open after he stops speaking like a dummy’s for just one second too long before he remembers to close it.
“And does the kiai know?”
“One of his boys knows. Parno.”
Which means Hasyim knows. Which means Hasyim—so frightened, so unlearned to the ways of the world, and so very arrogant that he had dared tell Murtawan that he had to get this town under control, as if he thought he could do a better job—is rallying his boys to protect the pesantren with sticks and knives and fire, if they have to, and boys that age are such easy triggers. This whole village, these days, is such an easy trigger—dragging bus drivers who run over schoolchildren through the street, setting thieves and looters on fire—that his only worry is that he might have overdone it, this time. Chosen too big of a wave—is that even possible? No. Stay focused. Stay balanced. Eyes up. Ride the wave. Glide forward. Stand. Lead.
