CHAPTER 1
“How the fuck are you this rich?” I took in the old vestibule, the wood ceiling that domed our heads. Time etched itself into the shape and stretch of the Heian mansion, its presence apparent in even the texture of the crumbling dark. It felt profane to see the place like this: without curators to chaperone us, no one to say do not touch and be careful, this was old before the word for such things existed.
That Phillip could finance its desecration—lock, stock, no question—and do so without self-reproach was symptomatic of our fundamental differences. He shrugged, smile cocked like the sure thing that was his whole life.
“I’m— Come on, it’s a wedding gift. They’re supposed to be extravagant.”
“Extravagant is matching Rolex watches. Extravagant”—I slowed down for effect, taking time between each syllable—“is a honeymoon trip to Hawaii. This, on the other hand, is … This is beyond absurd, dude. You flew us all to Japan. First class. And then rented the fucking imperial palace or—”
“It’s not a palace! It’s just a mansion. And I didn’t rent the building, per se. Just got us permits to spend a few nights here.”
“Oh. Like that makes this any less ridiculous.”
“Ssh. Stop, stop, stop. Don’t finish. I get it, I get it.” Phillip dropped his suitcases at the door and palmed the back of his neck, looking sheepish. His varsity jacket, still perfectly fitted to his broad quarterback frame, blazed indigo and yellow where it caught the sun. In the dusk, the letters of his name were gilt and glory and good stitching. Poster-boy perfect: every one craved him like a vice. “Seriously, though. It’s no big deal.”
“No big deal, he says. Freaking billionaires.”
“Caaaaat.”
Have you ever cannonballed into a cold lake? The shock of an old memory is kind of like that; every neuron singing a bright hosanna: here we are. You forgot about us, but we didn’t forget about you.
Only one other person had ever said my name that way.
“Is Lin coming?” I licked the corner of a tooth.
“No comment.”
You could just about smell the cream on the lip of Phillip’s grin, though. I tried not to cringe, to wince, beset by a zoetrope of sudden emotions. I hadn’t spoken to Lin since before I checked myself into the hospital for terminal ennui, exhaustion so acute it couldn’t be sanitized with sleep, couldn’t be remedied by anything but a twist of rope tugged tight. The doctors kept me for six days and then sent me home, pockets stuffed with pills and appointments and placards advocating the commandments of safer living. I spent six months doing the work, a shut-in committed to the betterment of self, university and my study of Japanese literature, both formal and otherwise, shelved, temporarily.
When I came out, there was a wedding and a world so seamlessly closed up around the space where I stood, you’d think I was never there in the first place.
A door thumped shut and we both jumped, turned like cogs. All my grief rilled somewhere else. I swear, if that moment wasn’t magic, wasn’t everything that is right and good, nothing else in the world is allowed to call itself beautiful. It was perfect. A Hallmark commercial in freeze-frame: autumn leaves, swirling against a backdrop of beech and white cedar; god rays dripping between the boughs; Faiz and Talia emerging, arms looped together, eyes only for each other, smiling so hard that all I wanted to do was promise them that forever will always, eternally, unchangingly be just like this.
Suenomatsuyama nami mo koenamu.
My head jackknifed up. There it was. The stutter of a girl’s voice, sweet despite its coarseness, like a square of fabric worn ragged, like a sound carried on the last ragged breath of a failing record player. A hallucination. It had to be. It needed to be.
“You heard something spooky?” said Phillip.
I strong-armed a smile into place. “Yeah. There’s a headless lady in the air right there who says that she killed herself because you never called. You shouldn’t ghost people, dude. It’s bad manners.”
His joviality wicked away, his own expression tripping over old memories. “Hey. Look. If you’re still mad about—”
“It’s old news.” I shook my head. “Old and buried.”
“I’m still sorry.”
I stiffened. “You said that already.”
“I know. But that shit that I did, that wasn’t cool. You and me—I should have found a better way of ending things, and—” His hands fluttered up and fell in time with the backbeat of his confession, Phillip’s expression cragged with the guilt he’d held for years like a reliquary. This wasn’t the first time we’d had this conversation. This wasn’t even the tenth, the thirtieth.
Truth was, I hated that he still felt guilty. It wasn’t charitable but apologies didn’t exonerate the sinner, only compelled graciousness from its recipient. The words, each time they came, so repetitive that I could tune a clock to their angst, sawed through me. You can’t move forward when someone keeps dragging you back. I trapped the tip of my tongue between my teeth, bit down, and exhaled through the sting.
“Old news,” I said.
“I’m still sorry.”
“Your punishment, I guess, is dealing with bad puns forever.”
“I’d take it.” Phillip made a bassoon noise deep in his lungs, a kind of laugh, and traded his Timberlands for the pair of slippers he’d bought at a souvenir shop at the airport. It’d cost him too much, but the attendant, her lipstick game sharp as a paper cut, had thrown in her number, and Phillip always folds for wolves in girl-skin clothing. “Long as you promise you don’t spook the ghosts.”
In another life, I had been brave. Growing up where we did, back in melting-pot Malaysia, down in the tropics where the mangroves spread dense as myths, you knew to look for ghosts. Superstition was a compass: it steered your attention through thin alleys, led your eyes to crosswalks filthy with makeshift shrines, offerings and appeasements scattered by traffic. The five of us spent years in restless pilgrimage, searching for the holy dead in Kuala Lumpur. Every haunted house, every abandoned hospital, every storm drain to have clasped a body like a girl’s final prayer, we sieved through them all.
And I was always in the vanguard, torchlight in hand, eager to show the way.
“Things change.”
A breeze slouched through the decaying shoji screens: lavender, mildew, sandalwood, and rotting incense. Some of the paper panels were peeling in strips, others gnawed to the still vividly lacquered wood, but the tatami mantling the floors—
There was so much, too much of it everywhere, more than even a Heian noble’s house should hold, and all of it was pristine. Store-bought fresh even, when the centuries should have chewed the straw to mulch. The sight of it itched under my skin, like someone’d fed those small, black picnic ants through a vein, somehow; got them to spread out under the thin layer of dermis, got them to start digging.
I shuddered. It was possible that someone’d come in to renovate, maybe someone who’d decided that if the manor was going to house five idiot foreigners, they might as well make it a bit more livable. But the interior didn’t smell like it’d had people here, not for a long, long time, and smelled instead like such old buildings do: green and damp and dark and hungry, hollow as a stomach that’d forgotten what it was like to eat.
“Does someone use this as a summer house?”
Phillip shrugged. “Probably? I don’t know. My guy didn’t want to talk too much about it.”
I shook my head. “Because something about this place doesn’t add up.”
“We’re probably not the only customers in the ‘destination horror’ business,” said Phillip, grinning. “Relax.”
Faiz whistled, interrupting me. “Yeah, this is the real deal. My man, Phillip. You’re a gentleman and six quarters.”
Copyright © 2021 by Zoe Khaw Joo Ee
