The train pulled out. At length he fell asleep again and this time he dreamed — he dreamed of someone hitting his head and his head being smashed off his body, and then somehow he was looking down at his own head fallen to the ground and the head rolled over, and it was his mother’s head, smeared with violet lipstick. The eyes opened.
Jake woke with a jolt. Their compartment was bright with morning sun, and skyscrapers and motorways paraded past the uncurtained window. Chemda was awake and dressed.
“We’re here. Bangkok.”
She leaned over and kissed him.
His returning kisses were slurred, reluctant. The dream had been so vivid; why did he keep seeing this image, the disembodied head?
“Chemda.” He wanted to confess, to share, to divide his anguish. He’d had enough of lonely wondering. And he had been through so much with this girl, why not tell her?
He felt he was falling in love with her. He had no idea what falling in love meant or felt like, but if it was something like this, then he was happy to call it love, so yes, he was falling in love with Chemda Tek. But love meant he had to be truthful. He wanted to be truthful.
“Chem, I keep having these dreams. Sometimes daydreams. Nightmares, just idiotic nightmares, but they are persistent, this image I see.”
He told her. About the head, the floating heads, his mother’s face.
As his story unfolded he watched her expression turn from curiosity to concern — to piercing anxiety.
“The krasue,” she said. “What you are seeing is, as far as I can tell, the krasue.”
She explained further, quietly.
“A krasue is a malign spirit, cannibalistic, ah, bloodsucking. It appears mainly at night. It manifests itself as a woman, usually young and beautiful, with…” Chemda winced. “With her internal organs hanging down from the neck. Because she has no body. So she floats, with her spine and her organs trailing behind.”
“OK.” Jake swallowed hard. “And what does she do? This demon?”
“The krasue preys on pregnant women. It uses…” She sighed. “She uses an extended tongue to catch the fetus, by, ah, probing inside, up the vulva and inside the womb to devour the fetus. This causes diseases during pregnancy. Or so many Southeast Asians believe.”
“Sorry?”
“Jake.” She held his hand tight. “I know you don’t believe this stuff, and it sounds like a cartoon, but this really is an iconic demon, all across my part of the world. The legend comes from ancient Hindu India but it is deeply rooted in Cambodia, and Cambodian voodoo. The Filipinos have their own version, the Manananngal; the Balinese have the Leyak. Some call her the arp.”
“What about Angkor? I saw something like this in Angkor. A sculpture on the wall.”
“In Angkor they are called kinarees. Female spirits. But it is basically another krasue. They are everywhere. This icon is everywhere. There are legends and prayers about krasue, spells and stories. Even horror films.”
He stared at her. She looked at him. The train stopped, they had arrived. They had to disembark.
Chemda said, “The thing I don’t understand is… this is my culture. Not yours. This is not your culture. So why are you dreaming of an Asian demon?”
31
“Boris vyı˘ ti!”
Yakulovich was stabbing at the orangutan with the cattle prod, poking like some effete and feeble swordsman. But the shocks were strong: Julia — in her desperation — could feel them herself, faintly conducted into her body through the writhing muscles of the ape, frazzles of pain and pungent fear. She struggled under the gross, surging weight, pushing at the leathery skin.
“Teper’, Boris v vashu kletku!”
The orangutan began to cringe and shirk the blows; another shock from the prod dislodged the ape completely and sent him loping into the cage, which Yakulovich shut, and locked, with fumbling hands.
For a moment Julia lay numbed and flat on the slimy concrete; but then she seized herself and sat up. She was bruised but unharmed, terrified but unviolated — the orangutan had got no further than her arms and thighs. But the ape had ravished her sense of herself: she could never forget this. The electric prickle of the cattle prod.
She stood. Swaying a little. But she stood. Brushing dirt from her long skirt and her top. Brushing and brushing. Yearning to shower. To wash the hot musky smell of the primate’s fur from herself — and from her clothes. No, she would burn the clothes. The way she burned her clothes after Sarnia.
The director was actually weeping as he gazed her way — weeping like a child, sobbing like a doll designed to cry.
“What can I say — I am so sorry, Miss Kerrigan.” His sense of disgrace was obvious, he even lost conrol of his previously immaculate English: “Miss, sorry, mne ochen’ zhal, etogo nikogda ne sluchalos ran’she! I sorry. Vy dolzhny byt gormonal’nye. Opyat’ ya proshu proshcheniya—”
“Whatever,” said Julia. “You stupid man. You…”
These curses dwindled to nothing. What was the point? Julia had seen and done enough. The orangutan was hunched at the far end of his cage, his long arms curved over his face. The eyes were big and sad and thoughtless.
She had to get out, now. Julia had everything she required from the Sukhumi Institute for Primate Pathology. All the information it could ever provide; maybe even some vital clues.
But now she urgently needed to bathe.
Walking to the gate, and then to the top of the hill, she scanned the bleak Sukhumi streets. She was searching for a hopeful sign between the drooping palm trees. Looking for something saying Hotel.
For once, she lucked out. Hotel Ritsa. Its light was flickering in the drizzle half a kilometer down the hill, beside the arthritic tramlines, toward the coast.
Julia ran down, dragging her reluctant bag, and checked straight in. The reception area was dusty and careworn. The elevator was probably dangerous. The sheets in the bedroom were nylon. The showerhead belched spurts of lukewarm water. It felt mildly paradisiacal.
She showered, long and hard, and then crept into bed, and drank her bottle of duty-free Georgian wine — using the bathroom toothbrush mug — and then she slept, in the nirvana of scratchy nylon, for many hours. And then she woke, and went down to a hotel breakfast of processed pink ham slices with pickled eggs.
When she came back to her room, she showered once more: one final cleansing. But this time, when she stepped onto the bathroom tiles, to dry her hair, she lingered at the mirror, and she gazed: appalled — and intrigued.
Her pale arms and thighs were liberally covered in bruises, purple handprints made by the orangutan. The bruises showed where the beast had grasped her, and groped her, fiercely clutching at her flesh. The bruises were dark and livid.
A tingle unsettled her as she stared at these contusions. The tingle of an idea. The fingers were all there: the fingers of the animal’s hands, guiltless, brutal, different, undaunted. Guiltless as the boys who attacked her in Sarnia.
Then she thought of the Hands of Gargas: their poignancy, their sense of remorse. Human hands, so very old. And full of a strange regret.