Nothing But Blackened Teeth(2)

“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.”

“Was nothing.” Phillip bared a bright fierce grin at the happy couple. “Just some good old-fashioned luck and the family money put to great use.”

“You don’t ever quit about that inheritance, do you?” said Faiz, smile only as far as the spokes of his cheeks, eyes flat. He cupped an arm around Talia’s waist. “We know you’re rich, Phillip.”

“Come on, dude. That wasn’t what I was trying to say.” Arms spread, body language open as a house with no doors. You couldn’t hate Phillip for long. But Faiz was trying. “Besides, my money is your money. Brothers to the end, you know?”

Talia was taller, duskier than Faiz. Part Bengali, part Telugu. Legs like stilts, a smile like a Christmas miracle. And when she laughed, low like a note in a cello’s long throat, it was as if she had been the one to teach the world the sound. Talia laid long fingers atop the jut of Phillip’s shoulder and bowed her head, precociously regal. “Don’t fight. Both of you. Not today.”

“Who’s fighting?” Faiz had a radio voice, an easy-listening tenor just about south of primetime worthy. Nothing some hard living couldn’t fix, some good cigarettes and bad whiskey. He wasn’t much of anything except doughier than ever. Not fat—not that there was anything wrong with that—but glutinous almost, soft as good clay. Beauty and her unfinished pottery, half-molded, still slick; the tips of Faiz’s hair jutting out at the nape, dewed with sweat.

I felt an immediate guilt at the unkind observation. Faiz was my best friend and he’d done more than his share, talking Talia down from walling me out. She and I made eye contact as the boys bantered, their voices prickling like the hackles of a Doberman, short and stark, animosity panting between the niceness, and Talia’s expression congealed with dislike.

I stroked a hand over my arm and tried to keep a smile on. A muscle in Talia’s jaw went rigid as she cracked her face into a similar configuration: her smile tense, mineral, bracketed with impatience.

“I didn’t think you were actually going to come. Not after everything you had to say about the two of us.” Courtesy velveted her voice. Talia peeled from Faiz and strode across the room, closing the distance between us two inches too much. I could smell her: roses and sweet cardamom.

“You two weren’t happy,” I said, hands burrowed into my pockets, a slight backward lean to the axis of my spine. “I’m glad that you figured out your differences but at the time, you were at each other’s throats—”

Talia had almost three inches on me and levered that to her advantage, looming. “Your insistence that we break up didn’t help.”