Candle in the Attic Window(74)
Before I could answer, Grandfather jumped about with his back to me and planted his arms to the elbows in the mud. Then he began pushing forward in a crouch, amid the scrub growing in the Field, resembling a monk cleaning a temple floor. I carefully followed where his footsteps would have been. Through the fog, I saw the wire fence tangled in the fallen tree and quickened my pace, only to realize my grandfather could no longer protect me.
The corpse hopped over the fence with surprising agility and I remember praying – actually praying, for the first time since I was a child – that it would trigger a mine. Grandfather shouted and tried to shoo it away, but I do not know if it could even see him. It saw me, though, and I backed away as it advanced, no longer caring if I stepped on another mine. Then it pounced and I screamed and screamed and screamed, the stench of excrement and pus and fever-sweat and mud enveloping me in a nightmare haze as it pinned me under its knees.
Maybe it saw something of my mother in my pale, wet face, or maybe it simply enjoyed hurting more than killing. Regardless, it twisted its fingers through my hair and stretched its other hand towards my eyes instead of opening my throat like its first victim. I felt another panic attack swelling inside me, the jabbing pain in my chest almost equal to that in my plucked scalp. I must have screamed, because then its fingers were between my teeth, chili oil burning my mouth as the slimy digits tried to seize my tongue.
Grandfather floated in and through and around the muddy, swaddled corpse that pressed me deeper into the mire with its weight, but still it did not acknowledge the ghost’s presence. The soiled bandages dangling from its face brushed my own and I bit the fingers, only to have it snatch its hand free and begin pummeling my cheeks. I saw its teeth shining through the dark and the fog, its whole face glowing phosphor green.
I saw its eyes brighten with the same unnatural luminescence, and then another punch struck my temple, but it lacked the strength of the previous blow. I squinted, to bring my eyes back into focus, and saw that it looked past me, the jade light bathing its bared teeth and bulging eyes and dripping nose. I heard raspy breathing from behind me, saw Grandfather retreating behind the corpse, and then the thing howled and fled, departing as violently as it had arrived.
The fog had nearly swallowed the running corpse when the green light warmed my own cheeks, but before I could turn, an explosion shook the earth and I tucked my knees to my chest and whimpered. Parting my rapidly swelling eyelids, I half-expected to see my mother and father returned to rescue me, their ghosts tinted lime and their motives pure.
Instead, I saw the witch for what she truly was and closed my eyes right back up, holding my knees even tighter in an attempt to ward off the crippling pain in my lungs.
“Come on, Malis.” Grandfather shook me gently. “He’s gone and that means I’m to be off.”
This, combined with the endorphin cocktail stirring through my body, brought me around enough to sit up in the mud and put my arms around him. He hugged me and already, I noticed his sweet smell of tobacco and wet leaves was fading into nothing. Pulling back, I saw he grew more translucent by the moment, the shining witch-thing visible through his bare chest. I shook my head in a childish effort to dispel it all, but he took my hand and helped me up. I slipped as I did, his fingers no longer able to grip mine. Together, we approached the witch and the once-more-inanimate corpse.
“Thank you, ma’am,” I managed, disgust and pity and fear jostling around my taxed brain. “I’m sorry for everything I said. For everything I did, when I was little. I didn’t ...”
I could not finish, for she looked up from her meal and smiled at me. The man with the machete had not cut her throat, as I had assumed, but she had simply loosed herself through some means of her own. Her bark-like face and stringy hair tilted upwards, the light cast from below now brightening my face, just as it darkened her own. Her teeth dripped a mixture of feces and meat, the carcass of the raised and killed-again Khmer Rouge captain splayed before her facedown in the Dead Field, one leg missing and the other shredded beyond recognition.
She dipped her head again, burying her jaws in the corpse’s cratered posterior, teeth cracking bone to better access the ripe bowels. Only the complexity and the completeness of her organ structure allowed me to ignore my climaxing nausea. Watching her swallow, I saw no visible change in the skin of her neck, but where the exposed organs dangled beneath, I could clearly see the bulge of the food traveling down until it plopped into her surprisingly large stomach. I marveled at the emerald radiance her heaving lungs shone onto the scene, on the surreal impossibility of a living human head floating in the air, with all of its entrails and organs intact and functioning without the benefit of a body.
“Told you,” the witch said, meat and ordure pushing out between her teeth. “Learn something tonight, eh?”
“We were right,” I said, remembering our childhood theories regarding the witch’s true nature. “What did we call it? You? Arp? Krasue?”
“Call me by my name, girl,” she said, with a leer, and by the brilliant light emanating from her lungs, I saw that she had eaten all the way down to the man’s stomach. “Call me ‘Theary’. Or, if you like, ‘Teacher’?”
“You ate babies out of women.” I sat down heavily in the mud. “You’d float through their windows ....”
“Nonsense,” Theary snorted, her face and mannerisms so normal compared to the rest of her. “Might’ve helped a girl now and again get shy of a problem some boy gave her, but I’m no thief. Do I take what others throw away? Well, I’m not too proud. Children can think such things, but you’re a doctor now, aren’t you? Like me?”