House of Corruption (27 page)

“
Eng Banka! Ma’tu paa Eng Banka
!”

A girl drew the old woman back inside her window, but it was too late—her words spread to other passengers, whispers traveling from compartment to compartment, moving to those seated atop the train or standing in the open vestibules. Even the caboose man, a tattooed Dayak in a smart trainman’s suit, made a tribal sign with his hand.

“What did she say?” Savoy asked, as the train faded away.

“‘There walk dogs who drink blood,’” Kiria said.

“We are not as bad as all that, are we?”

“That was not about us,” she said. “Foolish old ghost stories.”

“When is the next train?” Grant asked.

“Three days.”

The village of Takala was little more than a single dirt road stretching from the platform to the shore of the Jebata River. They passed a church with a tall cross and whitewashed planking, two pubs fully stocked with liquor, a bunkhouse with so much bright paint they suspected it served as a brothel, a blacksmithy and a dozen other buildings reminiscent of a gold mining town. They peered through windows and knocked on doors. One pub’s door swung open against the wind, the commons empty, tables strewn with plates and dinnerware, platters and supper dishes filled with rotten food and crawling with cockroaches. 

“This is a one-horse town,” Grant said, “without the horse.”

“There were two hundred people last I was here,” Kiria said.

They arrived at a two-storied boarding house, the
Takala Hutch
. Grant peered through windows webbed with cracks and punctured holes. He pushed at the door and it opened, casually, the jamb unbroken. “There’s empty casings all over the floor,” he said. “Two different rifles. Someone held their ground inside here.”

“Natives?” Savoy asked.

“I could not imagine,” Kiria said. “The Dayaks in general are peaceful people. They only attack when provoked, and they have always been friendly here. There’s been local trouble; a man named Mat Salleh’s been known to attack British holdings, but...he would have looted the whiskey and burned the church to the ground.”

“I’ve not seen any livestock,” Grant said. “The tack shed we passed is plum full, but all the horses are gone. This place’s been empty a while.”

“Wonderful,” Reynard said. “There will be no guide. We should have kept on for the Kinabatangan.”

“I could guide us,” Kiria said.

“I’ve never known a woman to guide much of anything.”

“Then you’ve not met the right one,” she said.

“Aren’t you all the same?”

“Only if all men are as asinine as yourself.”

Whatever further retort Reynard cocked in his chamber proved to be a blank. The obscenities boiling on his tongue would not be appropriate for a lady, a Mormon, and a former Catholic priest. Best to write them down in his journal and underline them twice and add plenty of exclamation marks.

Kiria led them west through a line of trees to the Jebata River, its dock empty. With the butt of his rifle Grant broke the padlock off a supply shed—inside were stacked six long-necked
prahu
canoes. The Jebata, by nature of its flow off the highland, worked its way south-westward until it connected with the Kinabatangan and returned in a wide and meandering course back toward the sea. Where the two rivers met, Kiria explained, the monastery and Carlovec Manor stood waiting.

“I see no other alternative,” she said. “We can canoe for Saint Dismas in the morning. Or we wait three days for the train back to Sandakan, or continue to Lamag and hope we can charter something along the Kinabatangan, but there is no guarantee if what Duncan says is true. We can hike over twenty miles back along the tracks to Kinda Lu and hope the road is open, but we would need horses, and it is forty miles through the hills.”

“I vote we try this river,” Grant said.

“I wasn’t aware this was a democracy,” Reynard said.

“Wasn’t aware you were elected to anything.”

“It is my
sister
they have out there!”

“I can do it,” Kiria said.

Reynard started back toward the village. “I am beginning to think you did this on purpose.”

Nightfall brought warm rain and swarms of black flies. They slept in the boarding house, keeping doors locked and windows shuttered. The men took shifts sitting in the front parlor with the rifle in hand. None of them slept well.

At dawn they packed two of the prahu canoes. Grant offered to steer with Savoy on one and Reynard, offering no objection, with Kiria steering on the other. They shoved off the shore and, paddles in hand, began their trek downriver.

The Jebata began at a leisurely pace, weaving off the highland as granite cliffs rose on either side. The silt-brown water soon quickened between stacks of boulders down a long chute. Mangrove trees hugged the bank and dropped spidery roots as if gathering to drink; where the trees offered purchase, brush and creeping vines slapped at the canoes. Kiria kept the pace with her paddle and the men matched her rhythm.

“Keep as dry as you can,” she said. “Do not splash to cool off, though you will want to. Infection kills more men than anything else. If we must camp, staying dry will keep you alive.” The water rolled up and they crested a foamy hill. “I have been down this river a good dozen times.”

“And the last?” Reynard asked.

“Some time back.”

“Meaning?”

“A few years,” she said.

“A few being?”

“Six.”

“I see.” Reynard said. “Gentlemen, we are all going to die.”

27

In the hours that followed, Reynard’s prophecy proved false. Kiria led them skillfully as the Jebata grew difficult, dropping down long corridors of granite as the mountains fell away and the river rushed between the foothills. Grant proved an able handler of his own paddle as he fired his boat through the churning spray, Savoy clutching for dear life and paddling when commanded. They followed her directions to the letter.

It was late afternoon when the water fell glassy and sluggish, and there they rested and drank from their canteens and allowed the current to carry them along. A host of long-tailed monkeys bounded in the trees above their heads, squawking, pausing to consider the visitors. Savoy watched with a fascinated smile. From his satchel he removed a Kodak Brownie, extended its lens, slid in a plate of film and snapped a photo.

“Where did you get that?” Reynard asked.

“Sandakan.”

“We row through the bloody jungle to face a demon from hell...and you bring a camera?”

“Have you
seen
these monkeys?”

“Shush,” Kiria said. “We have reached Bukit Garam.”

The prahus drifted into a lagoon, and Kiria led them closer to shore. Twenty yards from the river’s edge stood a long, wooden building supported high off the ground by many poles. A veranda stretched along the length of the longhouse, separated into a half-dozen segments like tenement balconies. What sunlight that managed through the jungle caught and reflected off tin cups and cobbled plates of metal shingles, throwing beams of light through eaves and crossbeams where hung sheaves of dry herbs and bundles of gray lumps dangling in
rattan
nets.

“Heads?” Savoy asked.

“Those are very old,” Kiria said. “A man’s head holds power forever. Those in this village have long since given up headhunting. Someone here might be able to tell us about Takala.” She cupped her hands to her mouth and cried: “
Muah! Muah! Nombu no raja tu’no
?”

They saw no one along the veranda, no smoke from the longhouse or from the commons yard where two other longhouses crouched further inland. Kiria called again, louder, guiding her canoe closer to shore. As she started a third time, a voice emerged, tentative, in a language the men did not know:

“
Who are you
?”

“
Daughter of Wadian Lucy
,” Kiria replied in the language, “
child of she who perished in the Great Fire. We are on the river without a guide. We are bound for Saint Dismas. Is Raja Tuah still here?
”

A loud, sorrowful cry echoed from the longhouse. An elderly woman with dark, nutty skin emerged onto the veranda, dressed in a simple cotton sarong. Swirling patterns of black-dot tattoos covered her skin from feet to her neck. She raised her palms high above her head, covered her eyes, then raised her palms again.

“
He is gone
,” the woman cried, wailing with a low voice. “
She has taken him. She takes all of them. We have none to hunt for us.
”

“
Who is She
?”

“
Maligang
.”

“
Who
?”

“
She from Lehan Antu, She and her Eng Banka. Oh, Tuah! Why has She taken you
?”

“
Who is She
?” Kiria asked, louder.

“
Deceiver. She who casts us into River of Death. She who is always hungry...
” The old woman raised her arms again, her cry echoing. “
Dark light made flesh
.” She disappeared inside, her dirge joined by other voices in mournful supplication.

Kiria motioned for the men to ease their boats against the shore, stowing them further up the bank in tuffs of thick brush and out of sight from the river. With a resolute heft of her pack, she started for the longhouse. The men followed. The palatable concern in her voice convinced them now was not the time for argument; even Reynard kept silent, following silently at the rear of the line.

Supported over ten feet off the ground by stout, ironwood poles, the open space beneath the longhouse stank of dung and offal and fish, pocked with muddy holes simmering with insects. Around the far side waited the front door. A notched log had been lowered, serving as a ladder, and the four crawled up like awkward spiders. With some effort Reynard and Grant hefted the pole back up to the porch, making the longhouse an island for the night. Clusters of dry thorns coiled around the entrance and at every window like barbed wire, some as long as the palms of their hands.

“
Jeruju
thorns,” Kiria said. “A defense against evil spirits.”

“Against a penanggalen?” Savoy asked.

“Most especially.”

They stepped across the threshold into the commons-room, a wide, open space with an arched ceiling of reed and timbers, the floor scattered with rat pellets and old woven mats and husks of dried reeds. Surrounding the commons, five apartments shared the surrounding veranda. In happier times the house served many extended families, but no children ran here. No dogs barked, no women ground rice, no men sat smoking or gossiping. Kiria stood dumbfounded at the silence, the rotten scent of neglect.

The old woman emerged from one of the larger rooms. Behind her, three more elderly women huddled around a cold fire pit.

“
Where are the children
?” Kiria asked.

“
Gone. All gone
,” the old woman said, Kiria translating. “
I am Lingood. I have no riak to share. You do not have to remove your shoes. Maligang has taken our men
.”

“What does she mean?” Savoy asked.

“Superstitions,” Kiria said. “She speaks of Maligang, a demon who denies spirits the afterworld. If you are not careful she catches your
beruwa
, or spirit, and casts it into the River of Death.”

“That being—?”

“A spirit’s death. Forever death. She speaks of Eng Banka, like that woman on the train, and
Lehan Antu
, ‘Longhouse of Spirits,’ a term that is new to me. Before my mother was converted to Christianity she was considered
wadian
, a wise-woman. She taught me all the stories. Now...”

“Do you believe them?”

“They seem to be coming true.”

As night fell, they cooked a supper of fish and roots and bitter herbs. The old women made sure the men ate first, a strange charity when they, so alone, had next to nothing.

Kiria asked many questions. It began, Lingood said, when men did not return from hunting. Women too began to fade as they gathered rice, or went to herd goats, or to wash clothing in the river. Fires erupted in those villages that sent warriors to scour the forest. Bukit Garam was spared, Lingood said, only because there was no one of interest left to torment. She was not surprised to hear of Takala. Those evil spirits originating from Lehan Antu, she said, were widening their influence.

There were darker stories, the tales of men and women who had been taken by Maligang herself: male, female, white or black or brown or yellow, she did not care. These poor souls did not lose their heads. They lost their bodies, snatched away, never to return. The demons who served her, those called Eng Banka, took them and never gave them back.

“Surely the government would have made a fuss,” Savoy said.

“
They blame the Tree Children
,” Lingood said, once Kiria translated. “
They think we take heads when it is she who takes them, and wears them, and sucks the marrow from their spirits.
” She grinned a toothless smile. “
Your ghost-face men, with their shiny...they mean nothing to Maligang.
”

“Nothing?” Savoy asked.

“
She is coming.
”

Reynard rose from the floor and slipped out of the apartment. He wandered the dark commons, his footsteps hollow on the planking. Birds shifted in the rafters above his head. The jungle was far more invasive here than at Takala, and he could not help but wonder how Lasha must be feeling in the midst of such an alien landscape. She had to be at the end of their road. She had to be. This place
was
alien, overflowing with shivery life in every blade of grass and frond and dangling root as if each step outside disturbed microcosms of uncleanliness.

He rummaged in his pockets and found four wooden matches—he had tried to reacquaint himself with the pipe at Takala, coughed himself blue, and vowed never to touch tobacco again. With a fingernail he scratched one alight, the flame tiny and useless against the encroaching night. This place was meant to be inhabited. What could make an entire village disappear?