It was a slow weekday at Café Max, and an even slower one at the Fortune Teller’s office, which was located in the coffee shop’s back storage closet; the owner—Max himself—let him rent it in exchange for weekly horoscopes. Though the Fortune Teller’s horoscopes were always alarmingly accurate, whenever he bet on soccer games he lost. On this particular afternoon he was at the front of the coffee shop, gambling away his assistants’ paychecks on Liverpool vs. Arsenal with the other middle-aged men who whiled away their daytime there, sipping iced tea until it was an acceptable hour to begin drinking liquor, all of them elbowing each other for a better view of the tiny television.
Back in the storage closet, Second Assistant squished his leftover coffee grounds around with a spoon and glared at First Assistant over the desk that they were forced to share. He had never forgiven her for the fact that, while he had to put up with a plastic stool, she got a real chair with a cushioned seat because she claimed to have a bad back. Probably from all the flailing she did during her trances, which Second Assistant was certain she faked. He was also convinced that the Fortune Teller didn’t believe in First Assistant’s “ghost possessions” either but allowed them to continue because all of the wailing and spasming and rolling around on the floor impressed their clients (and guaranteed a bit of boob jiggling).
First Assistant’s alleged clairvoyance was the reason that she had been promoted above Second Assistant, leaving him with all the shitty tasks: he was the one who had to chase after sacrificial chickens when they escaped, drag heavy teak furniture into arrangements the Fortune Teller deemed more pleasing to the spirits, and revive old women with eucalyptus oil when they fainted during exorcisms. He was the one sent outside to burn joss paper during a monsoon, crouching damp and miserable beneath a rusty umbrella while, inside, First Assistant draped herself over a sofa next to the Fortune Teller and pretended to chat with the dead.
Second Assistant was starting to regret not studying English in university like his parents had wanted him to. He could have been a tour guide by now, getting paid to take drunk Australians around on a boat in Ha Long Bay. He wouldn’t live in a crumbling apartment complex, or have to wear cumbersome protective amulets while he slept because his job made him susceptible to psychic interference from spirits. He might even have a real chair. Second Assistant gave his coffee grounds another jab. He made a mental note to look up night classes at the nearby language academies when he got home.
And then the office phone rang.
“Saigon Spirit Eradication, Second Assistant speaking, please describe your supernatural predicament,” he rattled off in his most brisk, businesslike tone. On the other side of the desk, First Assistant rolled her eyes and continued thumbing through a magazine. Second Assistant made sure that the pen he chose from the communal pen jar was one of her fancy ballpoints.
From the other end of the line there was nothing but light, crackly silence. Another prank caller, thought Second Assistant, sticking the pen in his mouth and chewing absently for two seconds, before:
Cracklecrackle. “Hello? Hello?” A man’s voice.
Second Assistant spat out the pen. “Yes, hello? How may I help you?”
“Hello. My house has sounds,” the man said abruptly. “My wife and I don’t know where they’re coming from.”
Second Assistant could now identify his accent—the slippery Central Highlands cadence characterized by a general sloshiness of speech, punctuated intermittently with hard, phlegmy consonants. Noises—disembodied, he jotted down on a notepad. He waited for further elaboration, and when none came, offered: “Voices? Thumping? Footsteps? Weeping?”
“Dripping.”
Second Assistant stopped writing. “Dripping?”
“Dripping. You know, plip, plip, plip, those kinds of water sounds?”
“Yes, I obviously know what dripping sounds like!” said Second Assistant crossly. “I just think that perhaps you should be talking to a plumber instead of wasting the time of the premier ghost-catching agency in southern Vietnam!”
The man was not offended. “I would agree,” he chuckled, “if it weren’t for the fact that my house doesn’t have indoor plumbing. That makes the dripping a little more unusual, no?”
“Well couldn’t it just be…erm, trapped rainwater?” Second Assistant persisted halfheartedly.
“Believe me, I wish it was—I’m a pepper farmer. It’s the middle of the rainy season but we’ve barely seen any of the stuff. Driest August since the 2005 drought.”
“Well, how come you have a cell phone but no running water in your house?” Second Assistant demanded petulantly. The man snorted.
“It’s 2010! Everyone has a phone. What kind of hillbillies do you take us for? Maybe it sounds strange to you Saigonese, but I grew up without indoor plumbing, and it suits me just fine. There’s a well in the garden where we get all our water for cooking, drinking, for bathing…and for other business there’s a hole at the edge of—”
“I get the picture,” Second Assistant cut in quickly. Resigned, he lowered pen to paper again. “Okay, tell me about your dripping.”
“My wife comes from a wealthy, important family,” the man began. “And I…well, I told you. I’m a pepper farmer. The only reason I could marry her is because her father died back in the spring. Got himself squished. Freak accident: big stone terrace collapsed while he was underneath it. Terrible, terrible tragedy. But…” he trailed off, and when he spoke again there was a canny note in his voice. “I can’t deny that things worked out well for me because of it.” On the other end of the line, Second Assistant frowned. “Once he was gone, there was no one to object to my marrying his daughter,” the man continued, “and we inherited the plot of land where I farm now and the old house that came along with the property. Well, what used to be a house, anyway—about half of it burned down at some point, and what was left was full of old garbage from squatters. And when I started rebuilding it, I found the bones.”
“Bones? What kind of bones?” said Second Assistant, scribbling furiously. Now this was more like it.
“I’m pretty sure they were human, but I guess it could’ve also been some kind of big monkey. A lot of it was missing, see. The head wasn’t there; neither was half an arm. I think the body had been sitting out for some time and some dogs had gotten to it.
“Now, out here, in the hills, we’re not afraid of our dead. We know how to deal with them without having to hire fancy city conjurers—no offense, mister,” he added with a chuckle. “So I just gathered up what was left of the skeleton, gave them what I thought was a proper burial out in the woods, and burned incense and some spirit money. Just to be safe, I made an offering in the corner where I found it too. And a year later, after I had finished building the new house, I made sure to put a little altar in the same spot. Didn’t have any trouble at all, didn’t see or hear anything funny, so I assumed that that was the end of the story. Until a few weeks ago, when the dripping began…
“Just that plip, plip, plip sound in the night. That’s how it started. I was in bed, trying to fall asleep, and I heard it coming from the direction of the window. Water dripping slow and steady onto the floor. I lay there, listening for a while, and when I was sure I wasn’t imagining the sound, I sat up and got out of bed to go over to the window for a look. But the moment my feet touched the ground, it stopped. No sign of wetness, no leaks, no puddles. I thought it was odd but went back to bed and heard nothing for the rest of the night.
“Two days later it was back. During the day. As if it was bolder, you know? As if it had just been testing the place out before, and now it was more comfortable. I heard the sound coming from the kitchen, that same, slow drip, drip—but again, not a trace of water. My wife was with me this time. We both stood there, listening carefully, and finally decided that it was coming from one corner near the kitchen door. And the moment we went over to investigate, the dripping suddenly stopped and then began in the other corner. It was taunting us!”
“Sir, you’re talking as if you think this sound is…is conscious.”
The man considered this quietly for a moment. “I do,” he admitted at last. “I don’t think that it’s alive, necessarily, but I think that it’s…I think that it thinks. Somehow. I don’t know if it’s a ghost, I don’t know if it means to harm us, I don’t know what it is. But what I suspect is that it wants me to believe I’m going insane. It wants us all to. Lately it’s been trying something new: it waits for everyone in the house to be together—my wife, my mother, and me, at suppertime, usually—and then begins dripping for just one of us. Whoever hears the sound doesn’t know whether or not they’re imagining it, and the other two aren’t sure either. I don’t want to go crazy, and I’m worried I might be halfway there. Please…please let me speak with the Fortune Teller.”
Second Assistant tilted backward on his stool to look out the door and into the coffee shop outside; at the moment, the Fortune Teller was in the middle of what seemed to be a very heated argument over a yellow card, and Second Assistant decided it would be better not to interrupt. He doubted that his boss would be interested in taking the case anyway—it was a straightforward, benign haunting. A more expensive assortment of fresh fruit on the altars should do the trick, and if that didn’t take care of it, burnt offerings of paper decorated to resemble objects that the particular spirit might be in need of in the afterlife. In this case, perhaps a mop and a bucket.
“I’m sorry,” began Second Assistant drily, “He’s currently in another consultation. Why don’t you just leave your number with me, and later I’ll—”
“Okay,” interrupted the man sharply. “I can tell that you’re trying to get rid of me. But you just tell him this: my wife’s family name is Ma. Your boss knows the name. He’s got history with the family. You tell him we’re the Mas from Ia Kare and he’ll come.”
“Icky-what?” Second Assistant frowned. Weirdest name of a town he’d ever heard. It sounded more like a sneeze than an actual word.
“Ee-yah Kah-ray,” the man sounded out slowly for him. “Bastardized Viet form of the old hill tribe name of the place. No one knows what it really means anymore.”
“Eeeeeee-curry,” said Second Assistant, writing it out on his notepad. When he glanced up again, he saw that out in the café, the Fortune Teller had turned away from the television and was looking back at him curiously from beneath the brim of his lucky hat—a Stetson too large for his head that he always wore for his rituals and for watching soccer games.
“What did you just say?” called the Fortune Teller, rising from his chair and walking toward their closet. First Assistant quickly stashed her magazine under the desk.
“There’s a man on the line from—oh, here, just take it.” Second Assistant handed the phone over.
“Yes?” said the Fortune Teller softly. And then, “Yes. Yes, I remember. I see.” His face darkened. “No, I didn’t know that he had passed away.” A long pause. “I will.” And another. “We will. Thank you.” The Fortune Teller hung up the phone and turned to both assistants. “Pack a bag and get the car ready,” he told them, then returned to the soccer game just in time to see it end in a draw.
Twenty-four hours later, Second Assistant was in the Mas’ kitchen, trying to light a fire in the already staggering heat. The bluish mountains they had driven over to get to Ia Kare had gotten his hopes up that the Central Highlands would be cooler than Saigon, but it turned out to be just as unbearable, only dustier. He had already sweat through various parts of his shirt and down the back and sides of his neck, and his sweatiness prevented him from exuding the poised confidence that a professional ghost exterminator should possess. Unlike the rest of the house, the kitchen did not have electricity. Its walls were made of clay and palm fronds slapped over a bamboo-stake frame, the floor was dirt, and they cooked everything over coals using a three-legged cast-iron stand that was surely older than the war, and possibly predated the French. This complicated Second Assistant’s task, which was to boil water with incense and secure the perimeter of the house from the spirits who would inevitably be drawn to the ritual that afternoon. There was still much to prepare before the actual ceremony began, and it was already noon. The Fortune Teller never worked after the sun went down. It was his only rule.
By the time that he managed to coax up a steady fire and bring the Mas’ enormous kettle to a boil, Second Assistant had burned himself twice, and his face was now both sweaty and covered in soot. He lowered in three sticks of incense through the kettle’s spout, and the scent of sandalwood began to permeate the kitchen. At first this was a welcome change from its earthy, burnt-rice musk, but it quickly became choking. Second Assistant wrapped an old rag around the kettle’s handle and carried it outside to the edge of the garden, his legs already beginning to buckle and his arms shaking from its weight. Curls of perfumed steam rose up from the spout, causing him to sweat even more profusely.
He began at the family’s well, which was an unwalled, circular pit with a fraying rope dangling down into damp, inky darkness. It was much larger and much less charming than Second Assistant (lifelong city dweller, unacquainted with wells) had been anticipating. Trying his best to move swiftly but unable to manage anything faster than a brisk waddle, he circled the entirety of the Mas’ property, pouring out a thin stream of the hot water onto the ground as he went, and making sure to walk inside the protective ring he was making. Once, in the past, he had forgotten, unintentionally “locking” himself out of an exorcism. The perimeter was easy to follow because it was outlined by the crumbled remnants of a stone wall that had surrounded the house that stood here a century ago. When he arrived back at the well, he carefully connected the beginning and end of the ring.
Now completely soaked in sweat, Second Assistant returned the empty kettle to the kitchen. Even though First Assistant and the Fortune Teller were waiting for him to begin the rite, he decided to risk their annoyance and run back out to the well for a quick rinse before joining them. But in his haste, he plunged out the kitchen door without looking first and nearly plowed straight into Mr. Ma’s mother—Bà, the small, benevolent-looking heap of wrinkles in plaid house pajamas he’d seen napping in a corner hammock earlier that afternoon. Luckily, Second Assistant’s reflexes were fast enough that he managed to twist out of the way at the last second, swerving to one side and flapping his arms like a wounded stork. He landed on his tailbone in the dirt while four-foot-nine, eighty-seven-pound Bà remained upright and unscathed.
Bà did not appear to be startled. She did not gasp, or shriek, or laugh at the sight of Second Assistant sprawled on the ground. She did not even harrumph in displeasure. When Second Assistant gathered himself up and apologized politely for nearly knocking her over, she still said nothing. She offered no explanation as to why she had been loitering behind the kitchen. Second Assistant now noticed that in her arms she was holding a small dog.
The creature had short fur that was piebald white and orangey-brown and stuck up in clumps in different directions. Its snout was long and vulpine, and its tail was a feather duster. Second Assistant was studying the dog so intently because he had the curious sense that it was studying him back. It bore an expression that seemed distinctly uncanine. Second Assistant could have sworn that it was smirking at him. He apologized again, thinking that the old lady was just going deaf and hadn’t heard him the first time. Again, he received no response. While the dog’s eyes were still fixed on him in an unsettling kind of appraisal, the eyes of the woman were glazed over. She didn’t seem to be looking at him at all. The entire situation was now starting to alarm Second Assistant, and he began to back away slowly from both Bà and her pet. The elderly didn’t really need a reason for loitering, he thought to himself, but he shivered, despite the sweat still pooling at his collarbone. Bà had not moved an inch since their encounter. Second Assistant now decided against washing off, not wanting to linger in the garden with them. Because he was unwilling to go back in through the kitchen door where they were standing, he had to walk all around the property again and then enter the house by the front door.
Inside, Second Assistant joined First Assistant, the Fortune Teller, and Mr. Ma in the living room, where they were kneeling on a woven mat. He was informed upon entry by Mr. Ma that Mrs. Ma wouldn’t be able to join them because her stomach was still bothering her. Second Assistant hadn’t actually met the wife yet. His suspicions about this family were steadily mounting. Never before had he heard of a husband taking his wife’s family name when they married. Also, he was certain that when they had first arrived that morning, Mr. Ma’s excuse for his wife’s confinement to their bedroom was a migraine.
They faced the house’s ancestral altar, which sat on a shelf above a squat, ancient television with a wonky pair of antennae. On a good day, Mr. Ma had told them, they could pick up three channels. This altar was dedicated to an assortment of the recently deceased. The photographs clustered together were of varying size—the portrait of Mrs. Ma’s recently deceased father was the largest—and they were flanked on both sides by tall red candles and matching blue-and-white vases holding two-day-old chrysanthemums, newly droopy. A single soursop, scaly and brownish green like a pangolin, balanced unsteadily on a plate directly below.
“Much too symmetrical,” the Fortune Teller mumbled to himself as he studied the altar. “But also uneven.” His behavior had been odder than usual since leaving Saigon. He had not told his assistants why they had needed to prepare for the Highlands in such a hurry, or explained to them his own history with the place. Three or four times during the overnight drive up, he had pulled the van (borrowed from Max) over on the shoulder of the road, and then stepped out and stared intently into the rural nocturnal murk of a rice field or plantation or grove of lanky trees. He would remain there for several minutes, silently scanning the darkness, before getting back into the car and then continuing to drive. Second Assistant had been pretending to sleep the whole time.
The second altar—the altar for the bones—stood on the floor in a corner of the same room. This one was smaller—a box shrine, carved from splintery, dark wood and lit by a couple of battery-operated plastic candles—and haphazardly composed. It appeared that Mr. Ma had not known what to place in it and so had thrown together whatever was on hand. A ceramic figurine of a potbellied Chinese deity squatted next to a carved Buddha and one wobbly ornamental horse with a missing leg. There was a cup of ash and sand pricked with old incense stems, a dish bearing a small pyramid of tangerines, and both fresh and artificial flowers. The fake ones were cartoonish roses with dusty polyester petals and the real ones were chrysanthemums like those on the ancestral altar, but Second Assistant noticed that these ones looked conspicuously more pert.
The Fortune Teller was unlocking his briefcase, the only thing that he never asked his assistants to carry for him. It was a well-made bag—the leather was real, and of high quality, which was unusual, as the Fortune Teller was a notorious miser, only wearing the cheapest and most ill-fitting of clothes. First and Second Assistant both theorized that he had stolen the briefcase from a foreign businessman, for the initials J.F.A. were stamped in gold in one corner, and two of those letters did not exist in the Vietnamese alphabet.
The Fortune Teller rummaged around inside and pulled out a sheaf of papers covered in glyphs and diagrams that only he could read, then he turned to Second Assistant. “We’re running behind schedule,” he said briskly. “Is the perimeter sealed?”
“Yes,” sighed Second Assistant.
“No gaps this time?”
“No gaps.”
“Children and animals removed from the premises?”
Shit. The old woman’s dog. “Yes,” lied Second Assistant reflexively, though he could not stop himself from immediately breaking into a nervous sweat. It was fine though—he was already so sweaty no one would be able to tell the difference, and the Fortune Teller seemed too distracted to notice anyway. Second Assistant couldn’t believe that he had been so stupid. It was crucial to always, always, always clear the kids and pets out of the site of the ceremony—spirits could take possession of their bodies too easily. But it was too late to start the house cleansing and protective circle over again. Sunset was too close. Second Assistant prayed that the old lady and her dog would stay in the garden and out of the way. He consoled himself with the thought that it wasn’t wholly his fault—First Assistant should have reminded him.
“Then let’s start, shall we? I will begin by establishing contact with your unwanted house guest. Assistants!” he summoned, clapping his hands once. First Assistant and sweating, shaking Second Assistant arranged themselves on their knees to either side of him. The Fortune Teller selected three incense sticks and lit them. He tilted his hand and let the flames lick nearly up to his knuckles for three seconds before shaking the sticks out so that they burned more slowly. He watched the smoke thoughtfully and then, keeping the sticks clamped lightly between his palms, began to trace symbols in the air and mutter indiscernibly under his breath.
The incense sticks were almost reduced to ash now. The air felt heavy, ready. The Fortune Teller laid the sticks at the foot of the floor altar—the bone altar.
“Spirit, are you here?” he intoned.
There was a double thump as both First and Second Assistant bent over and bowed, following his words, their palms striking the cement floor at the same time. It was important to show respect to a ghost in order to catch it. Then they sat up on their knees again.
“Who are you?”
Thump, thump. They dropped into the bow again. Then up.
“What do you want with this family?”
Thump, thump. And up.
“Where are you from?”
Thump, thump. And up.
“Why are you here?”
Thump, thump. And up.
“Why do you—” THUMP.
Both Second Assistant and the Fortune Teller turned and stared at First Assistant, who had bowed too soon. Neither could believe that she would make such a novice mistake. But as they were watching, she rose up and then immediately fell back into a bow with another thump. “Stop that!” hissed Second Assistant. The Fortune Teller was frowning. But First Assistant’s eyes were closed. She did not notice them at all. She dropped forward again, but this time it couldn’t be called a bow—her arms stayed at her sides as she fell forward and smacked her forehead against the floor. This thump was loud, more of a cracking sound, but with a sickening, squishy resonance. But, as if pulled by invisible strings, she jerked right back up onto her knees again, spine rigid, her arms still at her sides. Second Assistant had figured that First Assistant was hijacking the ceremony with one of her “trances” for the attention, but he was now beginning to worry. He had never seen her behave like this before. She beat her face against the floor again and again, down and up without rhythm, faster and faster like a piece of machinery ready to explode.
“Can’t you do something?” cried Second Assistant to the Fortune Teller, embarrassed by the shrillness of his voice.
The Fortune Teller held up a hand to silence him. “It would be unwise to touch her,” he said softly. But it was unbearable to watch. First Assistant’s eyes were still closed, but her mouth had curled into a twitching grimace. A cut had opened on her forehead, but she still would not stop. Second Assistant turned around to look at Mr. Ma in the wild, desperate hope that he might step in and end the freakish display somehow. The farmer’s face was horrified, but he remained motionless, and the awful smacking continued. Second Assistant couldn’t take it anymore; he reached behind the Fortune Teller and seized First Assistant by the shoulder:
“Stop it! Just stop!” he shrieked. And at his touch, First Assistant went limp and flopped over onto her side.
It had been too easy. Neither one believed that it was actually over, and so they didn’t dare make a sound. Second Assistant’s hand remained frozen in the air where First Assistant’s shoulder had been. The Fortune Teller alternated between wordless scowling at Second Assistant for disobeying his orders and worried glances at First Assistant on the floor. And in that hectic silence, the dripping finally started.
They all could hear it—the slow, clear plip, plip, just as Mr. Ma had described. Invisible water falling. The sound was coming from the front door, from behind them. While First Assistant remained slumped on the ground, the three men turned around and saw Mr. Ma’s mother standing in the open doorway, the tiny orange-and-white dog still in her arms.
The dripping went on, languorously, as the group before the altar stared at the old woman by the door. Bà’s eyes were no longer vacant and dully glazed over like they had been in the garden. They were mad and shining and darting wildly around the room, and she was clutching the dog to her chest too hard.
“She is here!” The old woman hissed suddenly, misting them with flecks of spit. “She is here, right now! Don’t you see her?” The little dog made a muffled squeak as her grip on it tightened even further, and the sound of the dripping intensified, echoing off the walls, as if it were emanating from everywhere at once.
It was at this point that it seemed like the Fortune Teller had finally had enough and would bring an end to the chaos. He reached decisively for his briefcase. What action he was intending to take with it would remain a mystery though, because Mrs. Ma suddenly came bursting out of her bedroom, hair disheveled, one nightgown strap slipping down. She stumbled two paces toward them, leaned over and braced her hands against her knees, then with a great, phlegmy cough, she hacked up something dark and wet onto the floor. To Second Assistant it resembled a dead jellyfish, and he cringed at the squelch it made when it hit the concrete, before realizing that he had been able to hear it so clearly because the dripping sound had stopped. This did not comfort him as much as he thought it would.
Mrs. Ma remained doubled over, catching her breath. Her husband scrambled to his feet and rushed over to support her, but she brushed him off, and Mr. Ma had to hover anxiously behind her instead. After a minute she managed to straighten up again. “Hello,” she said, feebly but still regally, tugging up the straps of her nightgown. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, though I’m sorry it has to be under these circumstances.” Second Assistant was struck by how oddly elegant she was; how out of place she seemed in this remote, tin-roofed shack. Her hands were pale, gracefully shaped, and tastefully manicured, the wrists exquisitely avian. These were not hands that hacked fish to bits with a cleaver or slit chicken throats or whatever it was that people usually did out in the countryside.
Mrs. Ma wiped the corner of her mouth with one of her lovely hands and then faltered when she looked down at the black, slimy thing on the ground. “I—I don’t know what…how I…” She looked like she might be sick again.
The Fortune Teller rose. “It’s nothing to worry about,” he said soothingly as he walked toward her. “We’ve seen this sort of thing many times.” Second Assistant, still hovering over First Assistant’s unconscious body, knew that this was a lie. When he reached Mrs. Ma, the Fortune Teller faltered. He lifted his hand toward her head, as if to pat her hair, and then decided against it and made as if to take one of her hands instead. But he didn’t end up doing that either; his outstretched arm just hovered in the air between them, like he was afraid to touch her. Eventually the Fortune Teller’s fingers wilted back into his palm and he let the arm fall to his side. “Are you well?” he asked her quietly, peering intently at the woman’s face in the same way that Second Assistant had observed him staring into the black, arborous wilderness from the side of the road.
“I’m sorry. I’ll put her back in her room,” said Mr. Ma, coming over and taking hold of his wife’s shoulder. Second Assistant saw Mrs. Ma’s body slacken perceptibly when his hand—craggy from sun damage, the nail of the thumb grown intentionally long and slightly pointy—made contact with her skin. The strap of her nightgown slid down again, but she did not bother to straighten it. “I don’t know what’s wrong with her,” Mr. Ma said. “Or with my mother.”
At this, he, the Fortune Teller, and Second Assistant all looked back at the doorway, only to find that Bà had slipped away unnoticed while they had all been preoccupied with Mrs. Ma.
“Oh dear,” sighed the Fortune Teller. “Well, I’m sure she can’t have gone too far.” His usual briskness had returned. “Yes, why don’t you help your wife lie down, and then we’ll figure out where your mother has gone.” Mr. Ma led Mrs. Ma back toward the bedroom. When they were out of sight, the Fortune Teller turned to Second Assistant. “My briefcase! Get my briefcase!” he hissed.
Second Assistant glanced down at First Assistant, reluctant to leave her side.
“She’ll be fine,” said the Fortune Teller. “She’ll come around in another minute or so.” While Second Assistant retrieved the bag, he crouched down to examine whatever it was that Mrs. Ma had regurgitated.
“What is it? Ectoplasm?” Second Assistant asked. He handed the Fortune Teller his briefcase and then peered over his shoulder to see. He immediately gagged. It was a thick wad of human hair. Long, black, soaking wet hair.
The Fortune Teller rummaged around in his briefcase and pulled out a plastic bag, into which he deposited the hair clump. It was difficult to get all the strands inside—they kept escaping and clinging to the Fortune Teller’s wrist, leaving behind little ropes of slime.
Disgusted, Second Assistant went to go stand by the door and get some fresh air. The heat was still smothering, but he could feel his head clearing as he breathed. The land, starting at his toes and stretching out unbroken by any other buildings until the mold-colored mountains began in the distance, was drought parched and red brown and made him feel as though they were all trapped inside a giant clay pot. He scanned the empty road and mummified pepper fields for any sign of the insane old woman. The whole situation was making him very uneasy. He complained about his job, he knew, but he actually enjoyed it most of the time. He didn’t mind the truly frightening parts—belligerent poltergeists hurling chairs across the room and apparitions of flame were fairly normal occurrences at peak haunting season. There were proper protocols for dealing with those ghosts—they had clear causes, and so they had clear solutions. But the wrongness of this house was undefined and therefore unsettling to him. Right now, all he wanted to do was toss the Fortune Teller and catatonic First Assistant into the van and drive back to Saigon immediately. And truthfully, he wanted to throw beautiful Mrs. Ma in the back of the van and steal her away from this wasteland as well.
First Assistant was catatonic no longer. Inside, she sat up abruptly with a huge, gulping, respiratory cymbal crash of a breath. Second Assistant hurried to her side. A beat later, the Fortune Teller strolled over to check on her too, the bag of hair swinging from one hand and his briefcase in the other. First Assistant patted the bleeding, purplish lump that had formed on her forehead. “What happened?” she asked groggily.
“Oh good, you’re up,” said the Fortune Teller, clapping her on the shoulder and almost knocking her over again. “We have just over four hours left before dark. I need to go have a look at those bones in the woods, and while I do that, you,” he said to Second Assistant, punctuating it with a shake of the hair bag, “are going to go out and find her.”
“Bà?” asked Second Assistant.
“No, that fucking dog.”
Second Assistant laughed at first, thinking it was a joke, before he realized that the Fortune Teller was serious. “How do we know that it’s the dog?” he asked.
The Fortune Teller raised his eyebrows at Second Assistant under the brim of his cowboy hat. “Have you ever seen a normal dog with eyes like that? Help the old woman if you can, but what matters most is getting that animal back. Here,” he said, removing his hat and placing it on First Assistant’s head to hide her lump. “You, in the meantime,” he said to her, “will stay here and guard the lady of the house. We’ll all reconvene before sunset.” The Fortune Teller checked his watch, and the fear that Second Assistant saw sparking briefly across his face was just as unsettling as everything else he had witnessed in Ia Kare that day.
Bà had not been in the garden. She had not been anywhere in the house. Second Assistant had even crawled under the bed while Mrs. Ma was sleeping on it to see if the old woman was hiding underneath. Where she could have possibly gone Second Assistant did not know, but the Fortune Teller had made it very clear that it was his responsibility to recover the dog, as it had been his fault to begin with. So while his boss and Mr. Ma headed down the road to find and exhume the bones in the woods, Second Assistant set off in the opposite direction.
He didn’t know how he should even begin looking for them, and he had no idea what he would do if he found them either. Optimistically, he had brought along an old rice sack to stash the dog in if he did catch it, but now he felt even more foolish as he shambled aimlessly down the dirt road with it clutched in one hand, like a budget boogeyman in the kind of story told to frighten bad children into obedience—“Listen to your parents and don’t stray too far from home, or the Rice Sack Man will catch you and throw you into his bag!”
Second Assistant had been a good child. And he had grown up in the city, in a compound of cement cubes in District 4. So his parents had not told him stories about ghosts and ghouls and shapeshifters, but they did warn him to stay away from the men who shot up heroin by the smelly canal that ran through their neighborhood and a woman who sold lottery tickets on the corner. That was his earliest memory of fear—that woman. Her legs had gotten blown up by either the Americans or the Viet Cong—he couldn’t remember which. She parked her wheelchair on the sidewalk every day, her lottery tickets fanned out across the patchwork blanket she kept folded across her lap, the ends of her trousers dangling empty below or knotted above the knees. But it wasn’t her disability that frightened him, it was her face. The woman was always immaculately powdered and rouged. Her eyebrows were tattooed on, thin and perilously arched and blue-black, and above them were feathery Madame Nhu bangs, with each hair sprayed perfectly in place. She rimmed her eyes with thick black lines, both the inner and outer corners flicked out into little wings, and wore lipstick the color of dried blood. She sat there all day in the Saigon sun, still and silent, unlike the other ticket sellers who yelled and prodded and poked at you to buy. But she watched everyone who came down the street, eyes swiveling in their black kohl diamonds as she tracked their movements while a half smile curled on her lips. And it was the feeling of those eyes following you, and that inexplicable smile on her painted face, like a kabuki mask come to life, which gave young Second Assistant the shivers and were why he would always cross the street to avoid her. It was unkind of him, he realized when he was older, but he used to believe that she was a witch, even though he didn’t know the first thing about witches, having never heard the stories. Sometimes he wondered if the woman was part of the reason he had signed up to work for the Fortune Teller in the first place. He had never told his boss about it, but he often thought of her. His parents had moved to a new house when he was sixteen, and he had never seen her again. If she was not dead, she had to be ancient.
He had now been walking for almost twenty minutes through the wastes of Ia Kare and there was still no sign of Mr. Ma’s mother. It was time for a new tactic.
“Hello?” he called out to the empty ochre landscape, a little weakly. He cleared his throat and tried again. Embarrassment was no help in finding them, so he did his best to suppress it. “Hello! Bà, if you’re here, please come out! Perhaps we can talk? I just want to see if you’re all right!” His voice echoed off the rocks.
It was useless. She wasn’t here. Maybe she had done the smart thing and taken the opportunity to escape from this Highland hellhole.
Second Assistant sighed. Not knowing what else he should do, he spread out his rice sack on the rocky ground by the side of the road, sat on it, and quietly despaired.
“This is what we know so far about the spirit,” the Fortune Teller said, pausing on the side of the road to light a cigarette. “One: it targets women, or finds women easier to control—you observed that my female assistant, your wife, and your mother were the ones affected, yes? My suspicion is that it has housed itself within the body of your mother’s dog while it continues to gain strength. It’s a young spirit, I believe. It doesn’t realize the extent of its power yet. But this brings me to number two: it is learning. Quickly.”
“I’ll happily get rid of the dog,” said Mr. Ma. “Never liked that little mongrel. Do you think my wife and your assistant are safe back at the house? Has your assistant recovered enough?”
The Fortune Teller checked the position of the sun. It was the second time he had checked in the past five minutes. “How long until we reach the woods?”
“Shouldn’t be much farther now. Another ten minutes, perhaps.”
“No harm will come to your wife, I promise. I have taken precautionary measures to ensure that my assistant will not be possessed again. She was left an assortment of protective devices.” The Fortune Teller hoped that Mr. Ma was buying it; the only protective device he had left with Second Assistant was his lucky hat. He needed to change the subject. “Do you watch the Premier League?”
“The what?”
“Soccer! English soccer!” cried the Fortune Teller, aghast. Mr. Ma shook his head. “Your late father-in-law was a Chelsea supporter, if I remember correctly.”
“I don’t really know anything about sports,” said Mr. Ma blandly.
By the time that the Fortune Teller had finished his first cigarette and lit a second, the edge of the town’s old rubber plantation was visible, a dark line of trees waiting for them where the orange road abruptly ended. The Fortune Teller paused. “When you said that you buried the bones in a forest,” he said with a twisted smile, “I’ll admit that I hoped it wasn’t this one in particular.”
“You didn’t know where we were going?” asked Mr. Ma. “But I thought you would recognize the road.”
The Fortune Teller shook his head. “Nineteen eighty-six was a long time ago.”
Looking at it made the Fortune Teller feel seasick. When the rubber trees were first planted, sixty-odd years earlier, they had been in tidy lines, but since the departure of the French they had been growing untended. Each tree was now feral-branched and tilting in a different direction, but their original rows were still discernible, and this created a mildly nauseating visual effect. It did not help that their trunks were helixed with dark, scabbed-over knife grooves from the bygone days of latex harvesting. This sometimes made it seem as if the rubber trees were wiggling.
Mr. Ma approached one and ran a hand up the lumpy spiral of its scar. “But there’s nothing to be afraid of during the day. You know that. The little nasties that live in here are all down in their burrows and won’t wake up until after dark,” he said, locating a soft spot in the bark and then slicing into it with a long thumbnail. “But why would it matter? You’re not scared of them—the last time you were here, you were in the forest overnight. I heard the story. Or a version of it.” A slight blush spread over his face, and he waited for it to fade before he continued. “My wife never told me what happened when she disappeared in here, when she was a girl. She can’t; she’s too…fragile. I’ve only asked her about it once. She said it’s like there’s a fog covering her memories of that time in the forest and the two years that followed it. She can only remember little pieces of her life before age seventeen.” He was trying his very hardest to sound nonchalant, but his fingernail was digging into the tree with savage intensity. “To be honest, I was excited when the noises in the house started, happy even, because it finally gave me an excuse to meet the man who’d saved her. I thought, Maybe now I’ll find out the truth. I’ll find out why she’s like this.” He pulled his nail out and then leaned in closer to examine the cut he had made. After a moment he straightened back up. “No milk,” he said. “It’s too old. And the trees don’t run in the afternoon anyway.”
The Fortune Teller chose his words carefully. “I will say this once, and then I won’t speak of it again: I can’t tell you what happened here in 1986. This is both out of respect for your wife and because I’m not entirely certain what happened that night. Don’t ask me to tell you why that is. I understand your curiosity. I do, Ma, I do. But I urge you to stop wondering about it. Instead, be content in knowing that many years ago, your wife came out of this forest alive. Be grateful that she is yours, and be mindful of the fact that were it not for that night, she probably would be someone else’s.” The Fortune Teller now approached the rubber tree and made a scratch in the bark next to Mr. Ma’s gouging. “I saved her,” he said softly, “But I’ve never been sure that I didn’t cause her more harm in the process. I’ve come back to atone—that’s partially why I agreed to help you get rid of your house spirit—but I’m starting to suspect that the forest has its own idea of what atonement entails, and it’s different from mine. Look—”
A semeny dribble of latex had appeared in the Fortune Teller’s cut. “You see?” he said, drawing back and wiping his hand on his pants. “These trees don’t follow a schedule. They don’t abide by human rules. Nothing in this haunted place does. Why else would it be abandoned? Why else would they let all this land sit here and turn into a snakes’ nest, instead of tearing it down and planting another coffee field? You should always be wary of it, whether or not the sun is up.” He took a pull on his waning cigarette and searched Mr. Ma’s face for anger or disappointment.
The man’s expression was even, though his cheeks were flushed. When he spoke again, he did not address what the Fortune Teller had said. “You should put that out before we go in,” he said quietly, indicating the Fortune Teller’s cigarette. “It’s been a very, very dry season, and fires start easily.”
The Fortune Teller licked his thumb and forefinger and pinched the cigarette out between them with an almost inaudible hiss. Because of the heat, he had left his jacket back at the house, which meant that he did not have a pocket in which to stash the butt for later. So instead, he rolled it up inside the cuff of his left shirtsleeve.
He looked down the warped row of trees before him, straining his eyes to see past the point where it all became a brown-green blur. He could feel the forest thinking. It was a twenty-hectare botanical mind, alive and warped, dangerous things nestled deep in its roots. A collection of tainted memories growing out of the earth, just at the edge of the town that was trying to forget them. The Fortune Teller felt something stirring at the part where his stomach met his sternum. He closed his eyes and he was in all of the forests he had ever known. He was a little boy, lost and frightened, running through cool, green pines. He was a uniformed young man, holding a gun in a sweaty southern mangrove fen. He was a middle-aged man striding cavalierly toward this very rubber plantation twenty-five years ago, thinking that he was coming to save another lost child. And he was an old man standing before it again now, wondering if this time he would not reemerge from the trees. In his lifetime, the Fortune Teller had never gone into a forest and come out fully intact afterward.
Mr. Ma cleared his throat, unspooling the Fortune Teller from his reveries. “Shall we?” he asked.
The Fortune Teller opened his eyes gave him a wan smile. “I guess I’m ready.”
The men began picking their way carefully through the yellowing, shin-high grass. Behind them, the first tree was still weeping one long, white trickle from the slit the Fortune Teller had made.
“I remember that I buried the bones beneath a crooked tree about half a mile in,” said Mr. Ma. “It’s near this little hut I built, where I store some things—just my shovels and an ax or two, because I go out here to cut wood sometimes.”
The Fortune Teller frowned. “You don’t get frightened coming out here? I didn’t think that many people ventured out into the rubber trees.”
“I never come after dark. Haven’t had any unlucky encounters yet.”
They did not appear to be following a marked path; every so often Mr. Ma would pause, crouch to examine a root or a stick, and then take a sharp turn.
“My grandparents actually worked here, you know,” said Mr. Ma. “Back when it was still a plantation. Came here in…oh…’51? ’52, maybe? And barely made it out alive. They told me it was like a nightmare—the two Frenchmen who owned the place worked them like animals, everyone got dysentery, everyone got malaria, my grandmother almost lost a hand. They were lucky that the place went belly-up after only a few years. So that’s why I don’t mind coming out here—this dirt and these trees belong to me, because my ancestors bought it with their blood. Aha,” he said suddenly, voice brightening. “I can see the little hut through the trees—it’s just over there, sir. Not much farther now.”
The Fortune Teller saw something dark protruding from a root crevice and drew in his breath sharply. Mr. Ma followed his line of vision. “Just an old collecting cup,” he said, prodding it with a sandaled foot.
As they approached the wooden structure in the trees, it became clear to the Fortune Teller that it was not just a tiny shed, as Mr. Ma had led him to believe. It was larger than the Mas’ house’s kitchen, to start, and was constructed carefully, out of smooth, even wood planks. It had a padlocked door and a roof made of a sheet of corrugated tin, but no windows. The Fortune Teller cocked his head, listening, and furrowed his brow.
“Do I hear…birds?” he asked, puzzled.
“Let me show you,” said Mr. Ma, removing a key from his pocket.
The door swung open easily, letting in enough light that the Fortune Teller could see what the cabin contained: a small cot, unmade, with a rumpled blanket, and next to it, an old-fashioned lantern. What was most remarkable were the birdcages hanging from the ceiling—there must have been at least eight of them, in a wide array of shapes, each one elaborately carved. From the cages came the little chirps, the whistles and low warbles that the Fortune Teller had heard from outside. In here, in that murky light, surrounded on all sides by the birds with their avian murmurs and the oppressive smell from the rotting fruit in their cages and the chalky splatters of their shit covering the cabin’s dirt floor, he felt like he was suffocating. “What is this place?” he asked, exhaling heavily.
Mr. Ma leaned against the doorframe. “I told you—it’s my shed.”
“Does your wife know about it?”
Mr. Ma’s silence was sufficient answer.
The Fortune Teller looked at the cot on the floor, and the two rolls of toilet paper beside it. “You’re shitting in the woods? You’re sleeping here? You are coming out here after dark. Have you lost your mind?”
Mr. Ma sighed and peered into the birdcage closest to him. “This is my red-whiskered bulbul. She eats small bananas, mostly. Sometimes I’ll bring her a mango.”
“I’m not really very interested in birds, Ma…”
But Mr. Ma was already moving on to the next cage. “This is my smaller bush lark.” He would not make eye contact with the Fortune Teller and he was speaking more quickly than usual. “She likes seeds better than bananas. The larger bush lark is over in that corner, there. Next to my pair of swallows. It’s been difficult at home these past months, sir. My wife’s mind was never quite the same after she was lost in these woods all those years ago. I know her mother only let me marry her because no other man would, but I’ve never once complained! She’d been getting better though. I was making her better! I was making her good. Then the dripping started, and she fell apart all over again. Now, swallows are useful to have around. They eat mosquitoes, you see.”
He peered into the cage, pursed his lips, and made a few audibly wet air kisses at the birds before continuing.
“She hears the noises all the time—times when I can’t hear them. She hates the birds. Hates them! One night she tried to open their cages and shoo them all away. Lucky I caught her. I brought them out here and keep them locked inside so they’ll be safe. I sleep here sometimes too, to keep them company. This is my house. My own house! I didn’t inherit it, and I built it on earth where nothing had ever stood before. It belongs to only me.
“You see, I knew it was never going to be easy for her to share a simple farmer’s life with me, but I didn’t know that she came from a family of leeches! Old Ma’s brothers divided up his fortune between themselves—they don’t care about my poor, sweet, mad darling. All we were given was the shack and the pepper field. There’s no one but me to care for her now. I brought my mother to come live with us, so that she could help me look after her, but now the dripping’s made her go just as crazy as my wife. I’m the only sane one left!”
The Fortune Teller now doubted this very much. He sank onto the cot with a sigh. He was not sure how to proceed and didn’t know which he wanted more: a cigarette or for a breeze to come through the door. “What kind of bird do you have in there?” he said, changing the subject to buy himself more time, and pointed to the smallest cage.
Mr. Ma beamed with pride and walked over to the corner where it hung. “That’s my little girl—my green bee-eater. It’s tough to find bees for her to eat, but I’ll bring her flies, spiders, a baggie of ants, or even buy some berries if it seems like she’s getting bored with the bugs, or…” he trailed off abruptly and sharply into silence.
“Ma? Are you all right?” It was hard to make out the features of his face in the cabin’s poor lighting.
“She’s dead,” Mr. Ma said, his voice breaking. He lifted the cage’s door and gently removed the green bee-eater. The bird was about the size of an avocado but seemed smaller cradled in his large, weathered palms. “Take her,” he said to the Fortune Teller. “Feel how little she is. Look how beautiful. Take her out into the light and see.” Concerned that refusing would only upset the man further, the Fortune Teller reluctantly took the dead bird from Mr. Ma, rose, and walked over to the doorway. He had to admit, it was a lovely creature, perhaps even more so now that it was dead—the feathers jade green at its breast and back, amber at the top of its head, a slash of blue at the throat, and the undersides of its wings the exact shade of orange brown as the Ia Kare dust.
“I’ll get the shovels,” the Fortune Teller heard Mr. Ma say somewhere behind him, and he murmured something in assent before returning to his examination of the bee-eater. He did not like the bird’s eyes, he decided. They were still open, and they were red—bright red—perfectly round, with a slight film over the corneas. They looked like poisonous berries. They were much too red. He was staring at the eyes so intently, he never even heard Mr. Ma coming up behind him. The red eyes were the last thing he saw before he was hit on the back of the head with a shovel and the world turned inky black.
When the Fortune Teller regained consciousness, his hands and feet were bound, and he was propped up against a tree. As his eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness, he groaned. “Ma?” he croaked. His mouth tasted dry and vinegary and his head was throbbing. He licked his lips and tried again. “Ma!”
He heard a sigh from somewhere in the forest behind him but couldn’t turn his head. “Is that you, Ma?”
“I’m not Ma!” the sigher, whose voice belonged unmistakably to Ma, called back.
“Well, who are you, then?” the Fortune Teller said, leaning back against his tree and closing his eyes.
Ma choked back what sounded suspiciously like a sob. “I am no one from a nothing family!”
“So are most of us, Ma.”
“Don’t call me that anymore!” He was crying now, the Fortune Teller could tell. “I was never one of them, and I was a fool to believe that I could be. I married the insane daughter, I changed my name to theirs, for years I broke my back working their pepper fields, and I’m still nothing to them! Do you know what the family calls me behind my back?”
“No, what do the Mas call you?”
“Don’t even say their name!” he hissed. His voice was quivering. “The Field Rat. It was my wife’s father’s nickname for me, and even after I married into the family they refused to call me anything else. I’m still the Field Rat, but now I’m ‘Field Rat Ma.’ ”
“Well, that’s not so bad,” the Fortune Teller said brightly. “Would you prefer that I called you ‘Field Rat’ too? Seeing as you don’t like ‘Ma’ anymore?”
“Don’t. Say. That. Name!” Field Rat Ma shrieked, bursting forward from the trees to finally face the Fortune Teller. “It won’t matter what you call me for much longer. Look to your left!”
The Fortune Teller turned his aching head and squinted at the ground. He could make out a small, raised mound of earth beside him, porcupined with the remains of old incense. The Fortune Teller smiled. “I see we’ve finally made it to the bones.” He could see the Field Rat’s teeth through the darkness as the man grinned.
“I’ve decided to give it a sacrifice. That’s what they always want, isn’t it? The old ghosts? Papers, boiled chickens, altars, perfumed sticks—none of that is any use to them. The only thing they ever really want is blood. So I’m going to give them you. And then the dripping will stop, my wife’s mind will return to her, we will both change our names to Nguyen—to my name—and she will finally give me children, and then we will have the life we were supposed to.”
“My,” said the Fortune Teller, “that’s quite a lot riding on one sacrifice. How are you going to kill me, then?”
The grin widened. “Why would I go to the trouble of killing you myself when we’re in a forest full of snakes? Now, don’t go anywhere,” he said with a snicker, “I’ll be back in a moment. I have a little bit of bait. You’ll see.” He suddenly retreated back into the trees, leaving the Fortune Teller to tug halfheartedly at the ropes around his wrists and ankles. Field Rat Ma was only gone for two minutes. And when he returned, he was holding a burlap sack in one hand. There was a strong, damp odor and a muffled thumping coming from within. “Hush now, hush!” Field Rat scolded the bag, before he thwacked it against the ground hard, twice. The thumping ceased. “Don’t worry; they’re only stunned, so they won’t go far, but they’ve still got enough wiggle left in them to seem attractive enough to eat,” he said, before emptying the contents over the Fortune Teller’s head.
Two dozen toads, now mildly concussed, came spilling out of the sack, tumbling off of the Fortune Teller’s shoulders and arms and thighs and making slapping sounds wherever they made contact with his skin. The Fortune Teller shuddered and closed his eyes as they flopped over him; he hated amphibians. A few toads struggled to crawl away across the pine needles; most lay in the spot where they fell, waving their warty brown limbs in the air.
“Dinner time!” trilled Field Rat, giddy with spite. “I’m afraid that this is where I leave you, sir. Your sacrifice is very meaningful to me, and my wife and I will never forget you.” He rolled up the empty sack.
“Ma—” the Fortune Teller said, without opening his eyes. “Field Rat, Nguyen, whoever you want to be—do an old man one last favor and let me have a cigarette. Or just let me finish my leftover half from earlier.” The Fortune Teller could hear the Field Rat pacing, agitated, but it was too dark for him to make out the expression on the man’s face, and he was grateful, for it meant that he couldn’t be seen either. “Oh, come on now,” he pleaded, trying to make his voice sound as pathetic as possible. “I’m covered in toads. My death is already slithering toward me through the trees. Don’t I deserve one last smoke?”
“If I untie you, you’ll attack me with something,” protested the Field Rat. In the darkness, the Fortune Teller heard him trip over something that made a clanging metallic sound when his foot made contact. “See?” cried the Field Rat, “There’s old bottles and things lying around. You’ll find a weapon!”
“Of course I’m not asking you to untie me—unroll my left sleeve and you’ll find the cigarette. Just light it for me, will you? I’m not foolish enough to try and fight you—I’m seventy-five years old!”
Quickly, and with shoulders braced in case of a surprise attack, Field Rat Ma rolled down the sleeve and pulled out a crumpled segment of one of the Fortune Teller’s hand-rolled cigarettes.
“And the lighter’s in my pants pocket.”
They were both taken by surprise when the tiny orange flame sparked to life and they could suddenly see each other again. They stared at each other—Field Rat Ma’s eyes wide and too round, black pupils surrounded by whites surrounded by dark circles from a lack of sleep, and the Fortune Teller’s eyes almost indiscernible from the wrinkles they were buried in.
Field Rat Ma averted his gaze first. “Hurry up,” he muttered, tilting the cigarette to the Fortune Teller’s lips and holding it there while the old man took a long, greedy puff. Then the Fortune Teller sighed, leaned back against the tree, and closed his eyes. An unusual, pinkish smoke rose from the end of the cigarette, and its scent seemed off. “This some sort of special mix?” Field Rat Ma asked, and the Fortune Teller could hear the raised eyebrow in his voice.
“You could say that.”
“Well, it stinks.” Field Rat Ma coughed and then straightened up.
“Hey, not so fast.” The Fortune Teller tugged on his pants leg.
Field Rat Ma rolled his eyes and bent down to let him take another drag.
“So, I suppose this is how it ends for us, isn’t it, old friend?” murmured the Fortune Teller drowsily, patting his belly.
“We’re not friends!” scoffed Field Rat Ma. He nudged an escaping toad back toward the Fortune Teller with a foot. “What is it about them?” he sighed. “About their blood, that makes it so special.”
“The toads?” asked the Fortune Teller. Field Rat Ma didn’t notice when his mouth did not close completely.
“No, you demented old bat, not the toads, my wife’s family. They were rich when the French were here, and they were rich when the French were gone. They were rich when the Americans were here, and they were rich when the Americans were gone too.” His voice grew soft. “Wasn’t that the reason we fought those wars in the first place? So that people like them would become like us? Well?”
He turned to look over at the Fortune Teller, who appeared to have lost consciousness. He was slumped forward; the ropes binding him to the rubber tree were pulled taut. His white head lolled against his chest. Field Rat Ma shook his arm. “Hey! Old man! You can’t die yet—the cobras have to kill you!” He shook him again, harder, and the Fortune Teller’s head flopped backward. Field Rat Ma gave a frightened squeal and jettisoned himself away from him, dropping the burning cigarette into the dry undergrowth.
The Fortune Teller’s mouth was not there anymore. Neither were his nose and cheeks. The whole lower half of his face had caved inward; a sinkhole beneath two sad eyes. And then the smoke—thick, brick colored, choking—began to billow out rapidly, engulfing them both before Field Rat Ma had the chance to fully process the last thing that he would ever see. It was the Fortune Teller’s final kindness.
The Field Rat twisted and thrashed, thinking he was fighting a creature concealed by the smoke. He did not realize that the smoke itself was the creature. In the red miasma surrounding him, a darker red opened. It closed over his head and torso and the Field Rat was half a man. Then the smoke swallowed, and he was nothing.
The sun was beginning to sink, and First Assistant, still alone in the Mas’ living room, knew it meant that something had gone very, very wrong. Mrs. Ma, her ward, had been asleep since the Fortune Teller and Mr. Ma and Second Assistant had left, hours ago, so First Assistant hadn’t had much to do in regard to protecting her. She had spent most of the afternoon reclining in a hammock in the corner of the living room. The lump on her forehead was now the color and size of a ripe lychee, and she was still wearing the Fortune Teller’s hat. She thought that it looked much better on her than it did him, though it did smell a little. She made a note to remember to send it out with the rest of his laundry for cleaning when they got back to Saigon. He wasn’t paying her nearly enough for the extra hours she put in doing things that a spouse ought to. Once, First Assistant had asked him if he was lonely, having never taken a wife. The Fortune Teller had laughed loudly and then, bafflingly, pointed at his stomach and replied that he was never alone. First Assistant hadn’t bothered trying to talk to him about his personal life after that. Perhaps his off-putting sense of humor was part of the reason he had never found anyone willing to marry him.
Matrimony and her own husbandlessness were never far from First Assistant’s mind—unmarried at twenty-eight, she was standing on the high, crumbling ledge that overlooked spinsterhood. Her mother, who had wed at seventeen, always began their weekly phone calls by reminding First Assistant that her eggs were shriveling up, before launching into her usual reproaches about her unnatural employment—she was certain that the ghost-hunting business was really some sort of front, and that her daughter was actually a prostitute.
No, it was a more nuanced exchange than that. She was a vessel. That was what the Fortune Teller reminded her whenever she invariably started to question herself after one of her mother’s phone calls. She had learned to accept over the years that the invisible cosmic strings that fastened oneself to one’s body were tied a little too loosely in her case, allowing occasional, postcorporeal visitors. But she had never been able to understand what exactly happened to her during these times when her body was not her own. She never had any memory of the occupations. It was all just black until she woke up again. Where did she go? Did she stay in there, squished into a corner of her own mind while someone else took control? Was she hovering, unmoored, somewhere in the vicinity of her body but outside it? Or was it as she feared, and she actually took the spirit’s place during the time that it took hers—in other words, that she temporarily died whenever they were performing a ceremony. The Fortune Teller had never been able to explain it in a satisfactory way. He would tell her to stop trying to make sense of the process through physical terms, but First Assistant didn’t see how else one was supposed to understand a body.
The first time it happened, she had been at her grandmother’s funeral. Nine-year-old First Assistant, bored and drowsy in a corner, had nodded off and then woken up a few minutes later on the floor in the middle of the room, where she was told that she had been complaining loudly in her late grandmother’s voice about all the things that were wrong with the ceremony and scolding an aunt about a cooking pot she had borrowed three years ago and never returned.
By her fifteenth birthday, First Assistant had played host to half a dozen other deceased relatives and the occasional neighbor. Her mother admitted that there was something supernatural at play, and that it wasn’t just an extended prank or an unusual form of epilepsy, only after the girl was possessed by a great-uncle who had died during the war, long before she was born, and during the trance rattled off the flamboyant, unusual profanities that he himself had coined, all in his thick Ha Tinh accent. The Fortune Teller was called.
He had been slightly less wrinkled thirteen years ago, but in all other ways the same: behatted, perpetually distracted, wreathed in a tobacco cloud. First Assistant remembered peering at him through the upstairs window of their house, down a quiet alley in Phu Nhuan, as he knocked on the door, and feeling slightly disappointed. He was far from imposing in his shabby suit, and there was no aura of power about him, no presence indicating that he was someone who possessed the secrets of the world of the dead. He looked like one of the delivery men she would see napping on their motorbikes between shifts, with their legs sprawling open and their heads balanced on the handlebars with a folded newspaper for a pillow.
She recalled her mother drawing the curtains and muttering under her breath about how the neighbors would see the “black magic” and gossip about the family even more than they already did. The Fortune Teller had begun removing equipment from his briefcase (like the Fortune Teller, it too was a little less battered thirteen years ago) and setting it up on their coffee table—there were small bags of dried herbs and unnaturally colored powders, a vial containing a viscous red liquid, sticks of incense, candles with runes carved into the wax, a buffalo horn, sheets of parchment paper covered in writing so minuscule that the words looked like fleas on the page, a knife, and one giant, gnarled root that still had dirt clinging to its fibers. First Assistant, in her blue school uniform, had gone pale imagining the procedures that were to come, and her mother had felt queasy and gone into the kitchen to make tea. Once she’d left the room, the Fortune Teller had looked at the terrified teenager and laughed.
“Oh, don’t worry about all this,” he said, indicating the objects spread on the table before them. “They’re all for show. Props. Just some oddities I found while tidying up the other day that I thought I’d bring along. Because there’s nothing I can do to fix you. But I didn’t want to show up empty-handed. Image is everything in this business.” He’d grinned. “Now, let’s go over some important things before your mother comes back. I said I couldn’t fix you, and that’s true; you will never be able to stop the ghosts from coming in, but you can make it more difficult for them. Obviously, steer clear of cemeteries and funerals. Avoid the recently bereaved, because their loved ones are still loitering around. You’ve mostly been dealing with dead relatives, correct? Within the next few years it’ll start being the spirits of strangers too, so be prepared for that. I’m going to give you these…” Here the Fortune Teller had gone digging around in his pockets and pulled out a small envelope folded out of red cellophane. Inside she could see what appeared to just be scraps of paper of varying sizes.
First Assistant had been skeptical, but the Fortune Teller reassured her. “No, no, this one isn’t from my attic—this one is real. Don’t open it. Keep it in your pocket at all times if possible. It might help. But really, why do you want to stop them? The spirits, I mean. I understand that they can choose very inconvenient times to come, but it’s a gift, to be the way you are. If you decide, someday, that you’d like to do more with your talent and not just try to hide it from your neighbors, I hope that you might consider coming to work for me.” He scribbled an address onto the back of one of the illegible papers and handed it to her along with the little red envelope. “Now, I think we should make your ‘exorcism’ a little more convincing.” He tossed a couple of the little powder bags in her direction. “Why don’t you smear some of that on yourself? That’ll be a nice touch. And then when your mother returns, we can all go outside and set the root on fire.”
He hadn’t charged them very much, so First Assistant never felt too guilty about their deception. And his advice, for the most part, had worked; she feigned headaches or cramps to get out of going to funerals and wore the little red envelope on a string around her neck, under her clothes. There were only two more incidents, and both times it was Grandma again—both times with more complaints. Sometimes, however, she would feel a kind of tingling sensation, a buzzing that began at the top of her head before moving down to the base of her neck, and wonder if it was, figuratively speaking, a spirit jiggling the doorknob.
First Assistant attended a fairly well-known university in Saigon, received a degree in accounting, and was promptly employed by an electricity company. She purchased seven different pencil skirts and matching blouses, one for each day of the week, and wore her favorite set on her first morning on the job. But when she arrived at the office, she paused and felt the familiar scratch of the red envelope against her sternum. She turned and hailed a taxi. She removed the envelope from its string around her neck and tore it open, sending most of the little bits of paper, whatever they were, spinning away in the breeze. She uncrumpled the old address paper from the corner of her wallet where she had kept it all these years and gave it to the cab driver. Fifteen minutes later, she was in front of Café Max.
First Assistant rocked in her hammock in the Mas’ house, listening to the relentless hum of cicadas in the twilight. Her head itched a bit. She took off the Fortune Teller’s hat to inspect it for lice, but it was now too dark to really see, and she was too comfortable to get up and find the light.
Sometimes she did genuinely think that she would grow old alone, like the Fortune Teller. Her friends had stopped setting her up with their handsome cousins and coworkers after a disastrous dinner date three months ago, when she had been possessed at the sushi restaurant where they were eating by the spirit of the man’s late mother, who told him he was better off getting back together with the ex-girlfriend he was still in love with. First Assistant now had to take her chances with men she met on the internet. More than half of her online messages were from Westerners, but First Assistant didn’t respond to those, knowing that her English wasn’t good enough to tell the foreigners with fetishes apart from the ones without them. The cheap dates took her out for afternoon coffee, the ones who hoped she would be an easy lay took her out for evening coffee at cafés conveniently located next to room-by-the-hour motels, the old-fashioned ones took her for mung bean and coconut pudding, and the ones who wanted to show off but weren’t really rich took her for Korean barbecue but showed up early and ordered for the both of them so that First Assistant couldn’t ask for expensive cuts of beef. Apart from this, First Assistant viewed the men as generally indistinguishable from one another but didn’t feel guilty about it, because she was certain that they used far worse rubrics on her and the other women they dated.
This was First Assistant’s secret foolish wish: that if she had to be plagued by spirits, they could at least advise her on her love life. The midmeal intrusion of her date’s mother had been embarrassing, but the more First Assistant thought about it, the more she was grateful for all the time it had saved them. For all of the pointless future sushi dinners and unenthusiastic fondling and the eventual breakup she had been spared. Why couldn’t other ghosts chime in like that on all of her blind dates, albeit in a less aggressive manner? Just whispering discreetly into her ear—a little bit of romantic insider trading, that’s all she was asking for—to let her know whether or not the man had any real potential. The dead knew. They could easily say to her, “This one isn’t ready for a commitment.” Or “This one has four different girlfriends and is stealing from two of them.” They didn’t even need to go into that much detail; First Assistant would be perfectly happy with a succinct “No, he’s not the one. No, it’s not him either—”
“It’s me,” came a voice from behind her in the dark. “Don’t be frightened.”
Too late for that—First Assistant was so startled by the sound that she tumbled backward out of the hammock. From the ground, she looked up and saw that the voice was Mrs. Ma’s. Only her periphery was visible in the half dark—she was dressed in some sort of bizarrely floaty, full-length white outfit, and the effect was uncomfortably spectral.
“I’m so sorry! Let me help you up,” said Mrs. Ma. A light flicked on, and First Assistant winced at the sudden brightness. She now saw that for some reason, the woman was clad in a Western-style wedding dress that gushed lace at its hem. “I thought it would be less of a shock if I announced myself first instead of just turning on the light,” Mrs. Ma explained.
First Assistant just blinked in confusion, still sprawled on the floor with one foot tangled in the hammock’s netting. This woman bore little resemblance to the frail, hair-vomiting recluse she had met earlier this afternoon—she was serene and self-possessed, radiating a cool power despite wearing a rabid meringue of a gown. Mrs. Ma floated across the tiles to her, and when she reached out her hands, First Assistant took them and allowed herself to be pulled up to her feet, even though she was perfectly capable of getting up on her own. While she was shaking her foot free of the hammock, Mrs. Ma suddenly crouched down again.
“Your hat!” she exclaimed. She retrieved it from where it had rolled and then placed it back on First Assistant’s head. First Assistant hadn’t realized how tall Mrs. Ma was—nearly the same height as the Fortune Teller. “It suits you,” Mrs. Ma said to First Assistant. Then, “Oops!—” The oversized Stetson had slipped forward over First Assistant’s eyes. Both women quickly reached to readjust it at the same time. First Assistant noticed herself noticing when their fingers brushed briefly.
“Thank you,” she said as the brim lifted and Mrs. Ma’s smile appeared in front of her once more. She gestured to Mrs. Ma’s gown. “I feel a little underdressed.”
Mrs. Ma laughed and shook her head. “Your outfit is perfect,” she said. (Untrue; First Assistant was wearing a baggy orange boiler suit. There had been a sale at a store that sold uniforms for electrical linemen, and the Fortune Teller had purchased one for each of them, thinking it would make the Saigon Spirit Eradication Co. appear more professional, but he and Second Assistant never bothered to wear theirs.) “This dress is absurd, but it’s the nicest thing I own, and it’s the only thing I have that my husband didn’t buy for me, so I didn’t want to leave it behind with him.”
It took several beats for First Assistant to put together what this meant. “Oh! So…so you’re…” she stammered.
“Yes. I’m going to get away from Ia Kare,” said Mrs. Ma. “And I’m going to get away from him. I’m scared that you’ll think I’m crazy when I tell you this, but today I heard a voice.” She steadied her breath before continuing, “I heard it twice. The first time was this afternoon, while you were all out here performing the ceremony. I was lying in my room, and I heard it say—I heard her say—‘It’s time for you to go.’ I could hear her in my ears, but it was like she was speaking to me from inside my own skull.”
“What did her voice sound like?” asked First Assistant. “Was it familiar?”
“I’d never heard it before. A woman. But with a voice that was low and…and sort of like rocks being crunched together. A crackly voice. But not a frightening voice. Immediately after she said it I felt sick to my stomach, and that was when I ran out here and I…” Mrs. Ma trailed off and looked at the spot where she had disgorged the hair clod. “I told myself that I had imagined her. But then, just now when I was in the room, I heard her again. That raspy voice from nowhere, clearer and more real than anything. She said, ‘It’s time for you to go. Go now, and go away from the trees.’ And I am going to listen to her.
“You don’t have a reason to trust me—you and I don’t really know each other, after all, we’ve just been thrown together by the same ghost—but I think that we might be similar,” said Mrs. Ma to First Assistant. “We’re the ones that the strange things happen to. We are the ones who feel them, but we’re never allowed to be the ones who control them. But now that’s changing.” She held First Assistant’s gaze. “I think that I’ve been waiting here for the past twenty-four years to hear someone tell me that I’m free to leave. And now that someone finally has, I don’t know why I couldn’t just say it to myself all along. So, will you help me? And will you go with me?”
First Assistant hesitated. She did not make decisions without the Fortune Teller. She did not summon or control. She was the vessel. She was the possessed. But just because she was the vessel did not mean that she could not be brave, and even now she could remember the sensation of the red envelope scratching between her breasts, and how good it had felt when she finally ripped it open. The car keys were already in her hand.
“Come on,” she said. “I hope that all two hundred pounds of your dress will be able to fit inside our van.” She’d said this hoping to make Mrs. Ma laugh again; First Assistant had noticed the warning sheen of tears in her eyes. She was rewarded with a light chuckle.
“My mother was the one who picked out this beast for me,” Mrs. Ma said, contorting the protrusions of tulle on her hips in order to fit through the doorframe. “I think it was her way of apologizing for not being able to protect me better. That’s why I can’t leave it behind. She really thought it was so glamorous.” Mrs. Ma looked at First Assistant and now gave her a true smile, with all of her immaculate teeth. “There’s a pair of fingerless gloves somewhere that match it, but I didn’t think I needed to bring those too.”
I will help you, and I will go with you, First Assistant thought to herself. I think that I would go with you anywhere, probably. “Don’t worry,” she said. “If my mother had gotten the chance to pick a wedding dress for me, I’m sure it would have been even worse.”
“Ah, wait,” said Mrs. Ma suddenly, squeezing herself back into the house. “There’s one last thing I forgot.” She walked across the room to the ancestral altar, her pale train flowing behind her, and stood up on her tiptoes. She plucked the portrait of her father from the shelf. “The voice didn’t tell me to do this,” she said, before smashing it on the ground. Then she picked her way delicately past the broken glass, over to where First Assistant was waiting for her.
Second Assistant did not realize that he had fallen asleep until he woke up and found himself looking at the stars. They were the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes, and they were magnificent—he had never seen so many, or seen them so clearly, before. While he was sleeping, he had wriggled himself beneath the rice sack so that it covered his chest like a little blanket. The Fortune Teller would be furious at him, he knew, but somehow he wasn’t worried. The stars comforted him. He banished thoughts of his employer and his unfinished task from his mind and snuggled tighter in the dirt, clutching his rice sack. He should move out to the countryside, he thought. Learn how to be a pepper farmer. How hard could it possibly be? He smiled peacefully to himself. The smile faded when he suddenly smelled smoke.
Second Assistant sat up in alarm. He had to get back to the house. But when he tried to stand, he found that his legs had become inexplicably heavy. He could not even bend his knees. He pushed up as hard as he could with his arms, trying to raise his body, but it was as though his bottom half was now made of lead, and he could not lift it more than two inches off the ground. “What’s wrong with me?” he grumbled. Then his eyes widened and he clutched a hand to his throat. Even though his mouth had been moving, his words had not produced a sound. Panicking, Second Assistant opened his mouth again and tried to yell, but he could only expel a hoarse wind. His voice, like his legs, had left him. He slapped his thighs in frustration and realized with horror that even his hand striking his leg had not produced a sound. He had become a ghost without dying. Or perhaps he had died and just hadn’t known. Second Assistant began to cry, noiselessly.
On the road before him, an opaque, ruddy shroud of smoke began to drift into his blurry line of vision. Second Assistant wiped his eyes. It was not really behaving like smoke—it moved more like fog, creeping in from the direction of the house in the distance, staying low to the ground—but it smelled of burning, so he did not know what else it could be. It did not disperse; it seemed to be gathering instead, rolling in and then lingering like a lumpy reddish blanket, just above the surface of the dirt road.
The smoke was looking at him. It had no visible eyes, but Second Assistant knew that it could see, and knew that it saw him. He knew this in his body, in the terror sending cracks running through him like footfall on thin ice.
It left the road and began moving slowly in his direction, slinking over the stubbly ground. Unable to run, unable to have the dignity of even yelling, Second Assistant could do nothing but attempt to conceal himself behind the rice sack and wait for the end. He tried to think of the things he had loved: his parents, his grandfather, his motorbike; the bright green color of his favorite bridge, Cầu Mong; the smell of Café Max. But all he could see was the lottery woman in her chair, her makeup-enameled face and her fistful of tickets.
The end came. Darkness gobbled up his vision, and then there was a crumpling in his ears, and then it was not the end after all, because he heard the sound of an engine puttering to a stop followed by the sound of himself screaming, screaming, loudly and in his true voice at last. He realized that his eyes were closed, so he opened them and saw First Assistant standing above him. The smoke was gone, and it felt so good to be back in command of his vocal cords that he raised his shrieking half an octave just because he could.
“Hush!” First Assistant clamped a hand over his mouth until his screams had subsided to whimpers. “We have to go,” she said gently. “The forest is burning. Look.”
Second Assistant rose to his feet with what felt like glorious ease after his ordeal. He squinted at the spot in the distance that First Assistant was pointing to—there was a smoggy orange glow above the horizon.
He turned back around to face the road. Their van was idling in the spot where he had imagined the smoke. Second Assistant blinked and shook his head. He abandoned his rice sack in the underbrush and made his way on slightly shaky feet over to the car with First Assistant.
“Boss, boss, let’s get away from this place,” he begged, climbing into the back seat. “Please, let’s hurry.” The figure in the driver’s seat turned around. “Mrs. Ma?!”
Mrs. Ma drummed her lovely fingers on the steering wheel. “We had to leave in a hurry and couldn’t wait for your boss to come back. It was time for us to go. We hope he’ll find us later.” First Assistant slid into the passenger seat next to her, and the two women exchanged a smile which Second Assistant could not interpret and did not trust.
“Shall we?” First Assistant asked Mrs. Ma softly. Second Assistant saw that she was still wearing the Fortune Teller’s hat, and now Mrs. Ma was wearing a frothy white wedding dress. Why were they having a fucking costume party? And where was the Fortune Teller? Mrs. Ma put the van into gear, and Second Assistant, feeling strangely like a child again, petulant when his parents were keeping secrets, swiveled in his seat to look out the back window at the dark country rolling away behind them.
As the van bumped along the road, Second Assistant was surprised to find that he was having trouble keeping his eyes open. He didn’t know how he could possibly sleep after the nightmare he had just experienced, but he curled up on his side like a cat and managed to doze, until he was suddenly awakened by the startled cries of First Assistant. Mrs. Ma braked so sharply that Second Assistant was hurled against the back of the driver’s seat. The vehicle went skidding sideways over pebbles and sent up a red nebula of dust before finally coming to a shuddering halt.
“Did we hit it?” whispered First Assistant, while Second Assistant picked himself up off the van floor. Mrs. Ma said nothing but unbuckled her seatbelt quickly and threw open her door, First Assistant following close behind. Second Assistant squinted through the windshield at the crouching figure caught in the beam of the headlights. He didn’t realize at first that it was human—it was hard to see with all the dust, and he mistook the Fortune Teller’s distended jaw, which was dangling open nearly to the ground, for a tail or long proboscis or fifth limb.
The Fortune Teller was down on all fours. What remained identifiable of the upper half of his face was bruised, and he was glazed unevenly with a wet, sticky film that had plastered his thin hair to his scalp and collected umber patches of dirt. His eyes were wide open but did not seem to register the two women approaching him. Even from inside the van, Second Assistant could hear the low, horrible moans that he was emitting from his gorge of a mouth.
“Help us carry him to the car!” yelled First Assistant, banging her fist on the hood. Mrs. Ma took a corner of the wedding dress and wiped away some of the slime from the Fortune Teller’s forehead. Second Assistant opened the van’s side door and scurried over to them, unable to stop his knees from shaking.
“Have you ever seen something like this before?” he whispered to First Assistant. She shook her head and began lifting the Fortune Teller by his armpits. Second Assistant hesitated for a moment before lacing his hands beneath his boss’s stomach and hoisting. Together they shuffled back around to the side of the van, with Mrs. Ma cradling the end of his mouth to keep it from dragging on the ground. They laid him gently down on the car floor and made sure his toes and his chin were clear of the door before sliding it shut. Mrs. Ma restarted the engine, and they set off down the road again in fraught silence.
Second Assistant sat rigidly in his seat, hyperaware of the Fortune Teller’s buckled form by his feet but determined not to look down until either daylight broke or they reached Saigon. The moaning grew softer. Gradually, Second Assistant realized that the sounds were changing too; the Fortune Teller was trying to form words. Second Assistant couldn’t resist anymore, and he glanced down. The mouth had retracted nearly to its normal shape but was still too stretched out for the lips to meet when the Fortune Teller moved them.
“Briefcase?” asked Second Assistant, attempting to guess what he was saying from the few vowels he could make out. “Are you trying to ask for your briefcase?”
“He took it with him when he went with Mr. Ma,” said First Assistant from the front seat. Second Assistant had noticed that she’d removed the hat when they discovered the Fortune Teller in the road, but she had since returned it to her head.
The Fortune Teller’s eyes would not focus on any of the other people in the car. Instead, they darted around as if following an invisible fly inside the van. The mouth had continued shrinking, and his top and bottom lip could now touch, but the words were still undecipherable.
“It’s just gibberish,” said Second Assistant, swallowing back a sob. “It sounds like he’s trying to speak goddamn French.” He could see that the Fortune Teller’s breaths were now slowing. Second Assistant counted between them. Seven seconds apart. Twelve seconds. He reached out and touched the Fortune Teller’s cheek, which had become the shape he knew once more. Fifteen seconds, and they were shallow, with a wet rattle beneath them. Twenty seconds. He stopped counting and tried to commit the Fortune Teller’s face to memory for the day in the future when he would need it—when his time really came, when the smoke or something like it finally got him, and he would have to think of what he had loved.
Hours later, just before dawn, something stirred in the well in the garden. From within it there came the creaking of rope, the sound of fingers scrabbling at dirt, and then Bà heaved herself up and out over the edge. Her movements were slack and unnatural, as if her body were a rubber glove flopping loosely on a too-small hand. Her eyes were blank and glassy. In the garden, she removed the little dog from where it had been tucked safely inside her pajama top and clumsily settled it into the crook of one arm like an infant. Then, with lurching, arrhythmic steps, Bà began to walk.
The dog lifted its head and sniffed, then buried its face back down in the old woman’s elbow. The fire in the rubber plantation had burned itself out by now, but there was still ash in the air. Bà did not blink. Her feet turned down the road, taking them toward the highway.
Bà and the dog had only been chilled from hiding in the well, and they were barely damp. But two paces behind them, something was following, leaving a wet trail in the dirt. It could not be seen itself—only the water that dripped from it, pockmarking the thirsty earth in its wake.