Beautiful. Terribly beautiful. No longer cinders, the heat growing, sparks whisper, surfaces burn.
"Hey!" shouted the demon. "You can"t do this!"
He blazed and burned and melted and reduced and disappeared.
I went.
They say you should always start small. Burn a tree, perhaps; a parked car, road signs, a traffic light. Not us. We, for starters, burned Mr Liberson"s flat--including two fine leather chairs, forks and knives (one dozen pairs), a life-size (ugly) china horse, and Mr Liberson himself.
Of course.
"The Allah Stairs"
Jamil Nasir.
Jamil Nasir was born in Chicago to a Palestinian refugee father and an American mother. He grew up in Jerusalem, where the following story is set. His short stories have appeared widely, and he is the author of five novels, the most recent being The Houses of Time. His third novel, Tower of Dreams, set in a future Middle East, was nominated for the Philip K. d.i.c.k Award and won France"s Grand Prix de l"Imaginaire.
When my brother and I were little boys, we had for a neighbour a littler boy named Laziz Tarash. Laziz lived in a second-floor apartment next to ours with his large, loud mother and small, quiet father. Uncle Nabil lived downstairs, and Grandfather lived down the street. Outside our front windows was an empty lot where a stonecutter sat all day under a corrugated iron shade and chipped blocks of stone, and beyond that, over the roofs of the stone houses, the land fell away in rocky hills grown with camel thorns and dusty-green scrub.
Laziz was a pale, puffy boy whose cherubic face turned pink in the winter cold. His mother was pale and puffy too, but his father was dark and thin, silent, serious and bald. We used to see him hurrying out in the mornings whilst we waited for the car that took us to school, wearing a baggy suit and clutching a scuffed leather satchel. I had the impression that he worked at the bank. I don"t think I ever heard him say a word. But Mrs Tarash said many: all day you could hear her piercing nasal voice through the apartment walls, raised in command or complaint against the maid, her husband, the tradesmen, or Laziz.
Laziz went to our school, St. George"s, where my father and grandfather had gone. He was too young to be studious, but he wasn"t loud and unruly like the other little boys. In winter, during playtime, he would huddle in a sheltered corner against the wind and rain, hands in the pockets of his blue sailor"s coat, standing first on one foot and then on the other. He didn"t have any friends. If you asked him to play he would just give you a shy, faraway smile and not answer. But there was a tree in a courtyard at the very end of the playground, and sometimes when it rained, or when it got very windy, Laeth and I would find Laziz standing under the tree, his nose running and his cheeks fiery pink, and he would tell us stories.
The stories were about his father, about how Allah had punished him for doing bad things to Laziz.
There was one that he told over and over in his lisping baby"s voice: "Last night my father spanked me for not doing my schoolwork. And then I knocked on Allah"s door and climbed up the Allah stairs, up, up, up, up, up. And I talked to Allah and told him. And I went and got the monkeys. They took my father and tied him to a tree and hit him!" Here there were sound effects and the waving of a fat little fist. "And they kept hitting him and hitting him until blood came out and he died!" Then he would laugh happily.
Of course, when we teased him he shut up and got his faraway look again.
Time went slowly for a whilst; nothing ever changed in our little town. Then we moved to a different country, where we lived in the city and had city friends. We went away to college, Grandfather died, and I got married. It was almost twenty years later before Laeth and I stood again in the dusty playground of St. George"s Boys" School. I was a lawyer, getting a stoop from leaning over my desk all day. Laeth, who had been almost as small and cherubic as Laziz, was now broad-shouldered and bearded and losing his hair. The town had changed too. There were big buildings and smooth roads, washing machines and colour TVs, and hardly anyone rode donkeys anymore. Someone had introduced a machine that could chip stone smoother and more quickly than any stonecutter.
We walked around the playground gingerly, hands in our pockets, as if we might break something. It was morning cla.s.s period, and a kindergarten song came faintly through the sunlight from the far end of the school building. Everything was smaller than I remembered--olive trees that had seemed towering were scarcely over my head; the long, long playground was a walk of fifty paces.
"Here"s where we used to play marbles," said Laeth.
"And cars," I said.
"Remember the moulokhia they used to serve in the cafeteria? That was like mucus?"
At the end of the playground was a tiny courtyard. In the courtyard stood a tree.
"Laziz Tarash!" we both said when we saw it.
"The Allah stairs," said Laeth, and we laughed. At that moment there was a rustling in the tree. A pair of beady eyes peered at us, and a small brown shape scampered up a branch and out of sight.
"A monkey!" said Laeth.
"Can"t be," I said. "There are no monkeys around here."
We went into the school building and collared a boy on his way to the toilets, made him tell us where Mr "Odeh"s cla.s.s was, and when the noon bell rang we met Mr "Odeh in the hall. We shook hands and told him who we were. He had diminished in size along with the rest of the school; he was now just a round-shouldered, potbellied man whose bald head barely reached my chin.
"Have lunch with me," he said, and led us across the playground, which was now filling up with boys, dust, and noise, out the tall iron gate, and down the block to a little apartment with an arched ceiling and thick stone walls.
"Of course I remember you," he told us as he took plates and cups from a cupboard. "I remember all my students. I remember how many times I had to slap their hands to make them learn their multiplication tables."
"Then perhaps you remember what became of Ramsey Abu-Nouwar, sir," I said.
"Ah, that one..." said Mr "Odeh, and we were off on the life histories of ancient school friends, forgotten long ago and not remembered until we set foot back in St. George"s. Laeth wanted to know about Kais Najjar and Gaby Khano. I was interested in Haseeb Al-Rahman. We were sipping tiny cups of coffee before we came to Laziz Tarash.
"Ah, that one," said Mr "Odeh, shaking his head. "A sad story. He works in the Gulf Bank here." He tipped his head in the direction of the market.
"What is sad about that, sir?"
"His father. Didn"t you hear? It happened many years ago, soon after the war. Your uncle didn"t tell you? Died, yes--a strange case. Ran into the street at two o"clock one morning in his nightshirt, screaming. Yes, they were still in the same building where you lived. He fell in the middle of the street and died. A man who got to him said he was raving on and on. About monkeys. Monkeys chasing him or beating him, I don"t know. Yes, monkeys.
"Laziz was still a small boy then. He and his mother moved in with the mother"s family in Abu Ghair, up the hill. Poor boy. Many years ago."
We had walked Mr "Odeh back to his afternoon geometry cla.s.s and were outside the school gate before Laeth said to me: "Monkeys."
"Strange," I said.
The next day we visited our old apartment building. It looked small and shabby next to the modern edifices that now lined the street, and the little shop on the corner had become a supermarket and petrol station. We knocked at the downstairs apartment (Uncle Nabil had long since emigrated to Australia); the old man who answered told us that the two upstairs apartments were vacant, and gave us the keys. Climbing to the second floor, it struck me that the building stairwell was the only part of the whole town that hadn"t changed in twenty years--the echoes of our footsteps, the dusty smell, the afternoon sunlight through dusty gla.s.s--I half expected to open our apartment door on the faded woven rug and dark, elderly china cabinets, to see my mother in the kitchen as she used to be when we came home from school, humming obsolete songs as she swept or washed dishes.
But the apartment was empty, sunlight lying silent on the dusty floor tiles, whitewashed walls echoing our footsteps. I went onto the tiny veranda behind the kitchen.
"For years and years," I told Laeth, "there was a big tin back here with a label that said "Vegetable Ghee." That"s my most vivid memory of this place."
"Don"t you remember mum and dad screaming at each other, and dad bringing flowers later?" asked Laeth.
We had the keys to the Tarash"s apartment, so out of curiosity we took a look.
"Watch out for monkeys," Laeth said as the lock clicked open. We had debated the monkey question the night before, sitting under the pine trees in Grandfather"s garden, breathing still night air perfumed with jasmine. Laeth had read that delusional episodes or images could be pa.s.sed subliminally within families, especially from parents to children.
"Probably Laziz picked up a delusional paranoid complex about monkeys from Mr Tarash, and combined it with the father-hating phase of the Oedipal cycle, resulting in the stories he told," Laeth said. "Later, Mr Tarash"s complex must have blossomed into a fully-fledged psychotic episode, causing him to have a coronary or stroke."
Laeth is a psychiatric intern; I never argue with him for fear of being psychoa.n.a.lysed. And anyway, the Tarash"s apartment seemed to bear out his theory of perfectly normal mental illness. There were no signs of monkeys, Allah, or stairs that went up, up, up, up, up.
At least not until we came to Laziz"s bedroom. It was a tiny room facing out over the fig trees and clotheslines in the backyard.
"Where are the Allah stairs, do you suppose?" I joked. And suddenly they were there, rising from the centre of the floor into a bright rectangle near the ceiling, rough stone steps that an intense radiance poured down, paling the sunlight.
As soon as Laeth and I let go of each other and I could think again, I waved my hands at them.
"Go away," I pleaded. They did, leaving the room empty and dusty, the afternoon sunlight quiet and bright.
"My G.o.d," said Laeth.
"What shall we do?" I hissed.
"Make them come back."
"Are you crazy?"
"Laziz climbed them, and he"s all right."
"You"re not actually thinking of climbing them?"
"We have to."
He was right. Otherwise crawl to our graves a stooped lawyer and a bald psychiatrist, not even able to pretend we had tried to grasp at something magic when it was shown to us.
"Allah stairs," I said, and they were there, fading everything else with their brilliance.
We edged to the bottom of them, crowding each other like little boys, looking up into the bright rectangle. There was only blinding radiance up there, with a hint of movement, like the inside of a sunlit cloud. We climbed. At the top we stood in a place made of molten light, the stairs a dark tunnel behind. The light was so intense that it made Laeth"s body and what I could see of mine translucent. It flowed and boiled like white hot lava. Then things started to take shape in it: divided, darkened, condensed into a jungle scene. A strange jungle scene. Everything was a little bit wrong, as though the trees, vines, bushes, and gra.s.ses had been shaped by someone who had heard about jungles but never seen one. The white, boiling light was visible at a distance, as if the jungle were an island floating in it.
In front of us stood a big tree full of monkeys, fierce monkeys with claws and fangs and snarling faces. They were tying something to one of the top branches. As I looked closer, I realised it was Mr Tarash. He had on his baggy suit and his satchel was tied around his neck with a leather thong. He thrashed and howled in terror. As we watched, the monkey started to beat him with sticks and rocks. Blood started to patter through the leaves.
"My G.o.d!" said Laeth, too loudly. The monkeys stopped and looked down. Then, howling, snarling, hurling their sticks and stones, they swung and scampered and dived through the branches toward us.
We ran--down the Allah stairs, out of the Tarash"s apartment, out of the building, and didn"t stop running until we reached the corner. The old men sitting on stools in the shade of the gas station stared. I straightened my shirt cuffs. Laeth brushed dust off his trousers. No demonic monkeys from another dimension chased us. Everything seemed normal, except for the two strange young men racing down the street.
We caught a taxi. By the time we got to the Gulf Bank on Salah-i-Din Street near the market, it was late afternoon. The bank manager was a fussy little man with a big moustache, who wanted to know if Laziz was in trouble. We told them no, we were just old school friends. Finally, there was a barely audible knock and Laziz sidled nervously into the office.
He looked amazingly like his father: small, thin, bald, haunted. He even wore a baggy suit, and I could imagine that he carried a scuffed leather satchel. He licked his lips and tried to smile when we told him who we were, and shook hands.
"Welcome. Welcome," he kept murmuring breathlessly. "Welcome. Welcome." He seemed to sense some calamity.
"We thought perhaps, since we"re in town only for a few days, we could have your company this evening," I said.
Laziz murmured polite things. The bank manager"s face softened. He looked at his watch.
"You still have twenty-five minutes in your shift. I will let you go early today. It will come out of your annual leave, of course."
On the pavement, when he saw the taxi, Laziz put up a feeble resistance.
"But--but where are we going?" he asked.
"Sightseeing," I growled, and shoved him into the back seat.
As we neared the street where our old apartment building stood, Laziz started to sweat.
"I want to go home," he whined. "Where are you taking me?"
When we sent the taxi away and started walking toward the stairwell door, he tried to pull. We caught him in two steps, each held him firmly by an arm, and marched him into the building. The deep transparent blue of evening filled the street, and there was no-one to see us. Inside, his legs went limp, and we had to drag him up the stairs whining and weeping. I still had the keys to the apartment. We dragged him into the little back bedroom and balanced him on his feet. He was mumbling incoherently.
"Remember the stories you used to tell us in school?" I asked. "Maybe you can explain something for us. Can you, Laziz?"
He seemed to be praying, making the gestures of blessing with trembling hands. I said, "Allah stairs," and when they appeared he screamed and ran into Laeth on his way to the door. We got him by the arms again and hustled him up the Allah stairs.
Again the molten light; again the malformed jungle with the tree of fierce monkeys. The monkeys had just finished tying Mr Tarash to one of the top branches, leather satchel dangling from his neck, thrashing and howling in terror. They began beating him; blood pattered through the leaves. Laziz stared fixedly. Soon, Laeth and I had to look away--Mr Tarash was a b.l.o.o.d.y pulp, not thrashing anymore--but Laziz still stared, as if he had lost the power to move.
After a whilst the sound of beating stopped and something fell to the ground with a sickening thud. Laeth touched my arm and pointed into the distance, where the outlines of the jungle faded into molten light. Two figures, one large and one small, walked along a jungle path toward us, holding hands. As they got nearer, I recognised them.
One was a large, shapeless woman, puffy and pale. She wore a shabby housedress I remembered from twenty years before. In fact, everything about her was the same except her voice: apparently her complaints had been stilled, because she beamed silently around at everything with astonished satisfaction, especially at the little boy she held by the hand.
He was a pale and puffy little boy of about six years old, with a fat cherubic face. He strutted proudly next to his mother, gazing imperiously around. He wore a long purple robe with planets and stars on it, and a matching purple pointed hat. He had on cowboy boots with jingling spurs, and over the robe a set of silver cowboy six-guns. There was a moustache painted on his face.
The two of them stopped a few feet away from us. Mrs Tarash didn"t seem to notice us; she just kept staring around with a look of complete admiration. The young Laziz studied us.
Finally, he gestured at the older Laziz.
"I thought I took care of you," he said, nodding toward the tree. Then he cried shrilly: "Monkeys!" They came swarming down, howling and snarling.
The older Laziz screamed, pushing Laeth into me, and by the time we got back on our feet he had just disappeared down the Allah stairs, the monkeys racing after him. We followed.
Moonlight filled the apartment through blank windows. The rooms were full of scuffling and hissing that could have been a hundred demon monkeys, or could have been something else. No monkeys were visible. The front door stood open. We ran down the stairs and into the street. Halfway across, two men crouched over someone who seemed to be lying down. As we got nearer, I could see it was Laziz, sprawled on his face.
One of the men looked at us in shock. "Dead," he said.
"Monkeys," said the other. "He was screaming something about monkeys."
"Biggest Baddest Bomoh"
Tunku Halim.
Tunku Halim is the author of two novels (Dark Demon Rising and Vermillion Eye) and several collections of short stories (including 44 Cemetery Road and Gravedigger"s Kiss). He is regarded as Malaysia"s premier horror writer.
Idris Ishak had this crazy thing about Zani Kasim: when she walked past--nonchalantly, as usual--his heartbeat would stop in its blood-filled tracks; her smile would cause his breath to get caught in his throat like a struggling frog. She exuded a subtle, sensual perfume he found himself longing for whilst he lay blissfully in bed thinking of her warm, dreamy eyes, which was far, far too often.
And that was why he found himself on a Singapore/Kuala Lumpur shuttle flight this Friday evening with the other holiday makers and balik kampung commuters. But Idris was on no holiday. He was on serious business. Business that made his hairs stand on end every time he thought of it, and made him almost quiver in delight as he thought about the bounty that would be offered to him.
It all started with Zani, of course. That was a given thing. The day she joined as the Managing Director"s secretary was the day Idris fell head over heels in love and in absolute wanton l.u.s.t for her. She wore a yellow blouse and cosmetic pearls with matching earrings, and he smelt that special perfume of flowers and musk. He was gone. It was oblivion at first sight. Her skirt fell just above her knees, and Idris spent that entire afternoon admiring the slim and well-shaped legs, watching them move against her knee-length skirt. The next morning found him gazing into those warm, dreamy eyes, longing to caresses her gleaming, shoulder-length hair, yearning to press his lips against her fair, smooth cheeks--not to mention those full, cherry-red lips.
There was nothing else Idris could do but beg for a date. Being only a clerk in Accounts Receivables, he did not feel particularly confident as to whether she would a.s.sent to his request. Idris, though, was quite simply in love, and love did strange things to people, whilst l.u.s.t produced even weirder behaviour. Idris plucked up his courage whilst hovering over the humming, chemical-belching photocopier. He tucked his bundle of accounts under his arm as if it contained the secrets of a dark universe, and ambled over to her.