Haunted Legends (4 page)

Washington Irving’s
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
is the immediate background from which my story was drawn. Irving is believed to have combined elements of local New York tales about the vengeful ghosts of Indian chiefs with German folktales of the Night Rider. Writing about thirty-five years after the American Revolution, Irving set his story in the Hudson River valley of a generation before, not long after that war ended. He made his Headless Horseman a Hessian trooper searching for the head he lost to a cannon ball—a very recent ghost. In part he was trying to create an American mythology to match those of Europe. I’ve always been impressed by how well Irving succeeded.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
has become part of our folklore and, along with his
Rip Van Winkle,
largely defines the way we think of Dutch Colonial New York.

Kaaron Warren’s first novel,
Slights,
was published by Angry Robot Books in 2009. Her second,
Mistification,
came out later in the same year, and the third,
Walking the Tree,
will appear this year.

Her award-winning short fiction has appeared in
Poe, Paper Cities, Fantasy Magazine,
and many other venues in Australia and around the world. Her story “Ghost Jail,” which first appeared in
2012,
was reprinted in
The Apex Book of World SF,
and “The Blue Stream,” her second published story, was reprinted in
Dead Souls.

Warren lives in Canberra, Australia, with her family.

St. Martin’s was clean, you could say that at least. Apart from the fine mist of leg hair, that is. I watched as Sangeeta (“You know me. I am Sangeeta.”) crawled through the women’s legs, a long piece of thread hanging from between her teeth. She stroked a shin, a knee, looking for hairs to pluck.

“Come on, Sangeeta. All the ladies are bald, now. You’ll have to find a dog.” The head nurse was very kind when there were visitors, the inmates told me.

They sat along the wide verandah that wrapped around their dorm. Like many verandahs in Fiji, it acted as their social center. It was the only place in the hospital with comfortable chairs. The dining hall, in a collapsing once-white building behind the dorm, had hard chairs designed to make you eat quickly; the art therapy room, across the loosely pebbled driveway, had stools. This was one of the things I wanted to change; put comfy chairs in so the women could sit and stitch, or paint, or weave. At present they made small pandanus fans and carved turtles from soap to be sold at the annual bazaar. My funding covered a month, and came from a wealthy Australian woman who’d visited St. Martin’s and been depressed at the state of the art therapy room, with paintings so old there was more dust than paint. They had no supplies at all. My benefactor hired me to sort out the physical therapy room, perhaps train the nurses in some art techniques. The nurses loved the sessions with me and used them to gossip, mostly.

Sangeeta dragged herself up using the band of my skirt. “You’ve got too many hairs in your eyebrows. And your lip is like a hairy worm.”

I turned a stare on her and she shrank.

The head nurse said, “You comment on our guest’s appearance? Are you perfect? There are things you will need to learn, Sangeeta. If you want to return to your life in Suva.”

Sangeeta primped her hair. “I am a beauty therapist. Of course I am beautiful.” Her face was deeply scarred by acne. Open wounds went septic so easily in the tropics. There was a red slash across her throat, vivid shiny skin, and two of her fingers were bent sideways. The fingernails were painted and chipped, bitten to the quick. “I studied in Australia. I married an Australian man but he went mad every full moon.”

“Of course he did,” the head nurse said. “He was cursed on your honeymoon at Raki Raki.”

“He upset the witches. He didn’t believe they were witches and took a photo of me kissing one of their pigs. Then he said I smelled like bacon and could not make love to me.”

“You are blessed,” one of the other inmates said. “You will die untouched.”

“My second husband turned out to be gay,” Sangeeta said, all the time the thread hanging from her mouth. She held the thread taut. “Can I pluck your hairs? Make you smooth?”

The other women set up a clamor, all wanting to do something for me. To me.

Only the old lady at the end of the verandah sat quietly, her lips moving. I walked over to her and bent my head down. “What is it, dear?” I said.

“I am that girl,” she said. “I am that girl.”

She was very thin. Her skin was wrinkled, looking like folds of brown velvet—a handmade soft toy for an ungrateful child.

“I am that girl,” the old woman said. Not much else. She would demand more porridge if it were on, and sometimes sing if the prayer was in Hindi. I would learn all this in the next few days.

She grabbed at me with sharp fingernails. They should have been clean; everything else was here, but I saw a dark red ridge I didn’t like. If she was a painter I would have guessed at Russet Red, but she was not a painter. A strong smell of bleach filled the air. I suspected it was their only cleaning fluid.

“What girl does she mean?”

The head nurse shook her head. “We don’t know. Malvika has been saying
that for a long time now. She’s been here since she was a teenager. Appeared one night, they say. Filthy, torn up, you’ve never seen such a thing, the old nurse told me. Nobody wanted her. Her family said no thank you. She’s not our worst, though.” She put her hand on a mess of a girl curled in a chair. “This one here came out of the womb this way. Her family kept her in a small
bure
at the back of their house until she got pregnant. No one knows who the father was but they say it was a dog.” The poor girl looked like she’d been grown in a jar. She was twisted and folded over herself and she chewed her lip as if it was food. My fingers itched to draw her, and the old woman, too. Not as part of my funding, but for pleasure. I paint the daily details of life, to make sense of the world and here the details were vast and many layered.

•  •  •

After the shift was over the head nurse took me to the suburb of Lami, where we looked at secondhand clothes that smelled so full of mold and mothballs you could never wash it out. We went into the dark, rotting shed that passed for a market. Piles of vegetable waste sat in their own sludge, but on the tables beautiful purple eggplant; hands of bananas; small, aromatic tomatoes. The nurse talked in Fijian to the stallholders and they smiled at me, nodding, welcoming.

“Artist!” one of them said. “Oh,
mangosa
!”

“
Mangosa
means smart,” the head nurse said. “She says you are smart if you are an artist. There’s the dog,” she whispered. She pointed at an enormous yellow mongrel. He sat with his back against a post, his back legs stretched out, his front paws lolling. He sat like a man. I’ve never seen balls the size of those he displayed, bigger than cricket balls and a dark grayish pink.

“He’s the one they say got poor Dog Girl pregnant. They say her children are running for local council.” At last she laughed and it finally sank in she was joking. I felt thick, slow, and patronizing, that I would believe such a thing.

I paid for the vegetables and I paid for the taxi to drop her home and take me to my flat. Local wages are so low, my per diem from my Australian benefactor was higher than her weekly wage.

We passed St. Martin’s on the way. “They are mental in there,” the taxi driver said, tapping his forehead. When I didn’t respond he twisted to look at me, the steering wheel turning about so we veered across into traffic coming the other way. “Mental crazy,” he said. “Don’t go in there.”

He seemed chatty, so I asked him who he thought “that girl” might be. He looked at me in the mirror.

“It might mean anything to anyone.”

“But what does it mean to you?”

“The same as it means to any taxi driver,” he said. “In the story she never gets old. Fresh-faced, sparkle-eyed, she smells of mangoes in season. Not the skin part, the flesh, chopped up and sweet on the plate. She picks up a taxi near the handicraft market in town. It’s always at five thirty-seven. A lot of us won’t pick up a girl from there, then. She climbs into the backseat and gives you such a smile you feel your heart melt, all thought of your family gone.”

“Have you seen her?”

“No, but my brother has. She asks to go to the cemetery, and if you pry and ask who is there, she will say, ‘My mother.’ You want to take her home and feed her. You keep driving and you can’t help looking at her in the mirror because she is so beautiful. She wears no jewelry apart from a small pendant around her neck. It nestles just here.” He touched his breastbone with a fore-finger, then spread his fingers as if holding a breast.

“I think that’s enough,” I said.

“The pendant has a picture of Krisna, fat baby eating butter. You turn the corner to reach the graveyard and you wait for her to tell you where to pull in. You feel a great coldness but the door is closed. You turn around and she is gone. Nothing of her remains.”

I shivered. It was an old story, true. But it frightened me.

Taxi drivers love to tell stories of the things they’ve seen, the people they’ve picked up. I dismissed it as an urban myth, but I heard it again, and again. Always a brother, or a best friend, and they always told it with a shiver, as if it hurt to talk.

•  •  •

On my next visit to St. Martin’s I walked up to the old lady, Malvika. “I am that girl,” she said. Between her breasts I saw a pendant, Krisna eating butter.

“You had a taxi ride?” I asked. “Is that right?”

“I . . .” She nodded.

“Will you walk with me? Let’s walk. I have sweets.” I whispered this last to her, not wanting the others to follow. All the women here walked slowly, their feet dragging on the floor, as if their feet were lead and they were too tired, too weak, to lift them each step. The women looked up at visitors but their
eagerness was frightening. They wanted to tell you, give you their stories, and they wanted treats. Sweets to suck is mostly what they craved, sugar being the easiest addiction. Sugar ran out here because the women spooned it into their pockets, poked a wet finger in there during prayer or while they swept, then sucked that sugar off.

We walked across the driveway and around behind the art therapy room. I didn’t want to sit inside on the hard stools. It was dusty and it stank of bananas and sweat in the room. I wasn’t sure how I’d fix it but fix it I would have to. We found an old bench in the shade behind the building and sat down. “I told this many times,” Malvika said. “A hundred. Two hundred. They stopped writing it down.”

“I can write it down,” I said. I took out my sketchbook but I didn’t write; I drew.

“My mother died and Father was happy to find a girlfriend the next day. He didn’t visit my mother’s grave but at least he gave me money for a taxi. I finished my job at five thirty and went to see Mother before going home. There were not many taxis because everybody had finished work but this one stopped. This one.” She closed her eyes. I thought of the head nurse’s description of Malvika’s arrival and my heart started to beat. I didn’t need to hear this story; I would do nothing about it. But I wanted to hear it. I did. I wanted to hear of suffering and pain. I wanted to draw it on my paper, capture the detail of it.

“Tell me,” I said.

“He was a nice man and asked me questions about work and school. Then he asked about boys and my body, words I didn’t like. I was not brave enough to tell him to stop, but I didn’t answer him.

“When we reached the cemetery he pulled right inside. It was raining and he said he didn’t want me to get wet though of course I would, standing out there. He stopped the car and jumped out while I gathered my things. He opened the door for me and I thought that was kind. But he didn’t let me out. No.”

She squeezed her hands together. “He pushed into the backseat and he took what my husband should have had. He hit me many times. As he climbed out, I tried to get out the other door but he slammed my fingers. He dragged me out into the mud and forced my face down into it. Then he did more terrible things, tearing and hurting me.”

She thrust her fingers into her pocket and brought them out covered with sugar. She sucked them.

“He picked me up and shoved me into the taxi. He could have left me there but he thought of a way to cover up his crime. He drove me up the hill to the hospital and dumped me here. I couldn’t speak sense for two days and by then it was too late.”

“And he invented the ghost story to explain where you had gone, in case people saw you getting in his taxi?”

The old lady looked at me and smiled. “I am that girl.”

I thought,
You cling to your youth. You dream of being young again, before this happened to you
.

The head nurse came around the corner. “There you are! You shouldn’t take her away. She is very unwell. Very fragile.”

•  •  •

I went home to paint in the afternoon light. Rain obliterated Suva Bay and was headed our way, so I had to work fast. My painting of Malvika disturbed me, because I had the sense of her as a young girl more strongly than of her as an old woman.

The hair on her chin. I knew there was a long, dark hair, but did it curl? Which side of her face was it on?

I hailed a taxi and had him stop at a roadside market, where I bought bananas and pawpaw with the change in my purse. Nobody would question me if I came with fruit.

Out of habit I asked the driver about That Girl. This one said, “She disappears. I can show you the place.”

•  •  •

I went to Malvika although it was close to dinnertime and the hospital didn’t like a break in the routine. She sat outside the door of the dorm. The other inmates used the door at the end of the verandah.

She sat bolt upright, her eyes wide open. She didn’t blink. Her mouth was open and saliva had dried around her lips.

“Omigod,” I said. “She’s dead.”