The Night Tiger(65)

It’s cold. So terribly cold that Ren thinks his heart will stop. The bones of his skull ache. The water feels thick, like runny gelatin or clotted blood. Shaking his head like a dog, Ren peers at the far shore. Yi is running up and down frantically, pure terror on his face as he mouths: Get out of the water!

He starts paddling in earnest. It’s not so cold if he swims, or perhaps his arms and legs are simply becoming numb. The farther he goes, the more the pain recedes and Ren has the funny feeling that he’s shedding his body. Something scrapes his leg. Gulping water, Ren looks down to see a row of gaping teeth and a glazed eye that floats past under his foot. A dead crocodile. It rolls, drifting deep in the river current, white belly showing for an instant, then drops away into the darkness. There are other things, too, deep in the river. Dead fish, dead worms, dead leaves. Ren gives a cry of disgust.

Panicking now, arms and legs flailing. The current drags at him. His head goes under again and he sees more shapes. A Chinese man drifts by, neck hanging at an awkward angle as though it’s been broken. A young Tamil woman, mouth open but eyes mercifully closed. No body, only her serene, decapitated head. Ren is crying, struggling. Bursting with terror, water searing his lungs.

A chunk of wood hits him. Gasping, Ren surfaces and makes an empty grab at it. As it floats out of reach he sees that Yi has launched it. Another log drifts towards Ren. This one is bigger and as it smashes into him, he sees Yi’s despairing face. Go back!



* * *



And he does. He does.

Ren is lying facedown on the floor of his room. His hands flatten out like a gecko on a ceiling only there’s nowhere to fall, he’s already at the bottom. After a while, he starts to cry.

The door opens. It’s Ah Long, his face creased with worry.

“Aiya! Are you hurt?”

Dizzy, Ren sits up. Ah Long feels his forehead. “I checked on you earlier—you had a high fever.”

“What time is it?” Ren’s voice is a dry croak. Ah Long wipes his face with a warm towel.

“About five in the morning.”

“It was so cold.” The memory of the freezing water makes the hairs on his arms stand up.

“That was the fever.”

Ren realizes that he feels fine. No chills, no burning weakness. He swings his legs experimentally. The dream recedes, like water flowing backwards, and most wonderful of all, his cat sense, that invisible, electric pulse which tells him about the world, is back, humming quietly in the background.

Ah Long wrinkles his brow, studying him. He looks like a grizzled old monkey. “You were shouting a lot. Who were you talking to?”

“My brother. My twin brother who died.”

Ah Long squats on his haunches so that his face is almost level with Ren’s.

“Do you often dream about him?”

“Not often. But it feels so real.” Ren explains about the train and the river, and how if he’d tried just a little harder he might have made it over to the other side.

“Has your brother ever asked you to come to him?”

“Why?”

Ah Long sighs and looks up at the ceiling. It’s quiet. So quiet in that dark and empty hour before dawn, when not even the birds are stirring. Malaya is situated near the equator; the sun doesn’t rise until seven in the morning, and the days are almost exactly twelve hours long.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” asks Ah Long.

Ren is surprised. Ah Long treats religion with the same suspicious necessity with which he regards electricity, radios, and motorcars.

“I don’t know,” says Ren. But the dreams aren’t the same as those stories he’s heard of pale apparitions that haunt banana trees, or women with long black hair and backward-pointing feet.

“I had an uncle who could see them,” says Ah Long. “He was a cook in a household in Malacca. A lot of peculiar things happened in that house, he said. They had a beautiful daughter who was supposed to marry a dead man.”

“Did she really?” Ren is so interested that he sits up straight.

“No, though he was from a very wealthy family. They wanted her to become a ghost bride.”

“What happened to her?”

“She ran away with someone else. But years later when my uncle was a very old man, he said she came back to visit him. And strangely enough, she looked exactly the same as when she left home at eighteen. Though that’s another story.

“My uncle saw ghosts all the time. It was very disturbing. Unlike the living, they were always in the same place. For example, there was one particular rickshaw that he said always had a passenger in it: a little boy who’d try to sit on people’s laps. And another time a woman sat next to his bed all night, combing her hair and crying. But he gave me some advice that I’m going to tell you right now, because I think you need it.”

“And what’s that?”

“Don’t talk to the dead.”

Ren is silent for a moment. Nobody has ever given him any advice on this. “Why not?”

Ah Long scratches his head. He looks tired and old. “Because the dead don’t belong in this world. Their story has ended—they have to move on. You can’t be obeying them from beyond the grave.”

Ren’s thoughts fly instantly to Dr. MacFarlane. “Won’t honoring their wishes make them happy?”