Not Forgotten

  Angel roared toward the compound, trying to formulate a plan.

  But as he came in sight of the gates, he still didn’t have one.

  I don’t have enough information, he thought, frustrated. I don’t know what I’m fighting.

  Except a really brutal kind of dying.

  He pulled off the road and killed the engine. He watched the gate. If someone came along on foot, he could saunter up, turn on the charm, and maybe fake his way onto the grounds with them.

  And there’s where the mixing-in part comes in yet again, Angel thought. My so-nonexistent charm.

  He thought of his Galway days as a wastrel, when he could charm almost any colleen into the hay barn. Even proud beauties like Dorrie.

  He wondered what had ever become of her.

  Nias, 1930

  Alice Kenney said to Father Van Der Putten, “Why Nias? Why not? I’ve always been drawn to the place.”

  She pulled her cloche over her forehead. Her feet were baking in her black boots. The sun was ghastly. She was going to freckle. The mosquitoes were biting her; if she didn’t die from the heat, surely she would from loss of blood.

  “It has great mystical importance to the natives,” the Dutch father informed her. He spoke beautiful English. She wondered if he had requested this posting, or if he’d simply been assigned it willy-nilly.

  He continued, “They believe one of their gods lives beneath the village. A sort of hellish demon.”

  “Good heavens.” She touched her chest. A beautiful Celtic cross lay across her white blouse.

  “It’s superstition, of course,” he added.

  They smiled at each other in tolerant amusement. Then Alice said, “I suppose one can’t expect savages in the middle of nowhere to be very sophisticated. In my own family, it was believed one of my ancestresses was a witch.”

  “How fascinating.” He raised his brows. “I’m very keen on that sort of thing. That’s why I asked to be sent here.”

  Ah. That answers one question.

  The other is . . . How observant a priest is he?

  The good father was rather handsome. Alice, for all her wishing to devote her fortune to good deeds, was still a youngish woman.

  In this day and age, twenty-seven is still young, she thought defensively. But she knew that at home in Galway, they were happy to see her go abroad. She’d failed to land any of the available men, and it was disheartening for a family of beauties to have their sole plain girl teetering on the brink of being an old maid.

  So it’s been a bit of a blessing, she thought. I get to do all the things they won’t permit the pretty ones to do.

  “Here’s where you’ll stay,” Father Van Der Putten told her.

  She stopped. It was a charming cottage made of wood. It rather resembled a tree house, with chintz curtains and a brick chimney. Though when one would need a fire in this overheated greenhouse of a country, she had no earthly idea.

  “I’m sure you’ll want to rest before dinner,” he continued as he opened the door.

  It was quite sweet, if very small. The single room featured a cot, a wooden chair, and a very tiny table. She noted the presence of an oil lamp and several candles.

  Over the cot hung a large and somewhat gruesome crucifix. The wounds of Christ were deep and very bloody. She swallowed, a trifle put off, but loathe to mention such a thing to a priest.

  “Do you . . .?” She laughed.

  He smiled at her. “Yes?”

  “I was about to ask you if you dress for dinner.”

  “Indeed we do.” He gestured to his clerical collar. “I’ll have on my finest. And the good sisters as well.”

  She was abashed.

  He said gently, “Please, wear whatever makes you comfortable in this heat. We stand on ritual, but not on ceremony.”

  She laughed at his joke. “Your English is excellent.”

  “I wish my Javanese were equal to it,” he admitted. “I can’t seem to make myself understood to those with whom I wish to communicate most.”

  “Well, do remember, Father, that they’re primitives.”

  “I try.” He sighed. Then he brightened. “At any rate, I know everyone will enjoy dinner tonight, with such a fascinating new dinner companion.”

  “Hardly fascinating.” She blushed.

  Their gazes caught, met. He didn’t look away. The smile on his face grew slightly mischievous. Very tantalizing.

  “Very fascinating,” he countered.

  Then he left her, shutting the door.

  She felt quite self-conscious, disrobing, knowing he was out there somewhere. She remained in her chemise only, taking off her stockings and other heavy underclothes.

  She lay on the cot — clean sheets; good heavens, how do they do the wash out here? — and tried to think about her purpose for being here. She had heard about Nias from the Sisters of Charity in Galway. The exotic land of Java was also a pagan land, filled with mystery perhaps, but also rampant disease and ignorance. Alice, an educated woman, could do so much good there, helping the nuns and the priest with educating the natives. The little church of Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy was struggling along, and it could certainly use another civilized white person in the midst of all that . . . yellow.

  “I’m not sure I’m all that civilized,” she murmured to the mosquito netting as she pulled it over herself. The mosquitoes were buzzing around her ears, making an astonishing amount of noise. They were buffeting her earlobes with such rapidity and force that they sounded like thunder.

  No.

  Like drums.

  Or is that my heart?

  She was the star at dinner, and good thing, too, because she had no idea what she was eating and no desire to find out. The food was extremely hot, and bits of it were chewy and leathery. It had to be some kind of unknown flesh.

  Very little settled in her stomach; she talked so much, trying out her broken Dutch, moved to near tears by the eagerness of the nuns to hear about “home,” by which they meant anywhere in Europe. Their longing made her wonder about her own commitment to stay here for at least six months. No one would come for her before then.

  She was on her own, out here in the jungle.

  Her journal helped.

  April 20, 1920

  I’ve been here for three weeks, and settled in, I think, to a fairly regular routine. I help the sisters clean the little church every morning, and then we prepare breakfast. Father Van Der Putten, as the only male in our henhouse, seems to enjoy swaggering about. For all they’re brides of Christ, I must confess that the sisters don’t mind his attentions in the least, commenting as he does on their rosy cheeks and bright eyes of a morning.

  But the roses come from sunburning, and they’re all leathery and rather old-looking. In comparison, I’m practically a dewy debutante. What an irony, then, that the only man worth having about stands on his vows, at least thus far.

  Of a night, I hear the mosquito-drums, as I’ve come to call them. I actually find myself waiting for them, else I can’t sleep. It’s uncanny how much their droning sounds like actual drums. I’ve mentioned the phenomenon a number of times to the others, but no one else makes the same connection. They’ve wondered aloud if something about the construction of the cottage makes them sound the way they do.

  But I think it’s part of my fanciful nature.

  “Or perhaps it’s your witchcraft,” Father Van Der Putten said after vespers last evening. “The beast below is calling you.”

  He chuckled when he said it, but I do believe that he half-believed what he was saying.

  Sometime in June, 1920

  Ah, you see? It must be June, at least. I can no longer keep track of dates. Only months. Father Van Der Putten tells me that if I stay here longer than a year, after a time I shall begin to lose track of the months. Merciful heaven! What an existence.

  I’ve finally met the natives. It’s incredible to realize that they’re capable of savagery that would send the typical Irish girl screaming in
terror. Though they’re pleasant enough to me, Father Van Der Putten tells me that shortly before my arrival, their warriors went on a raiding party. Dressed in their traditional finery — black jackets and plumed heads, like birds of prey — they butchered ten men from another village and brought back their heads.

  This they did, he now informs me, because “the god below” told them that he would rise soon, as a vessel was being prepared for him.

  He believes the vessel may have been the large circle of skulls they created from the heads of the vanquished. Indeed, sure and as I’m standing here, they showed me that on my first visit, smiling and gesturing to me.

  The headman has a son perhaps eight years my junior, and it seems he expects we shall marry. Or whatever it is they do to establish a bond between each other. The good Father has jested that he’ll perform a good Catholic wedding, and the nuns are very jolly about it as well.

  I must confess that he is very handsome, and well-formed, but of course it is all so ridiculous.

  Angel got out of the car. There was a stand of pepper trees to his right, their fragrance a sort of odd counterpoint to his situation. He had no idea if Doyle and Cordelia were in trouble — he wouldn’t let himself think anything worse than that — but here were the trees, wafting of pepper as if all was right with the world. In the grit of the city, evil was at home. But out in nature, which was generally a neutral third party, battles against the forces of darkness felt misplaced.

  He moved among the trees, a shadow melting into shadow, listening to the noises of the reception. Moving forward, he spotted an electric fence, strung ankle-height, and stayed on its outer perimeter.

  I should’ve packed weapons, he thought. Or at least run back for a few before I took off.

  His attackers had been unarmed except for their chop-socky routines.

  He kept walking, looking for a chink in the compound’s defenses. Then he ran up against the wall of the next-door neighbor’s.

  Californians were nothing if not known for their devotion to fencing in their property.

  There seemed to be no way to crash the party, though.

  Then he heard someone whisper, “Are you there?”

  He stopped moving. If he breathed, he would have stopped breathing. He did everything he could to make himself undetectable.

  “It’s me.”

  The woman in his head.

  He turned his head over his shoulder.

  She was facing him.

  “How’d you get here?” he said without preamble.

  She said nothing. Her face was white. Her eyes stared straight ahead.

  “Oh, no.” She clutched her head and began to cry. “It’s forgotten. It’s all forgotten!”

  Then she fainted.

  Nias, 1997

  The night air was clogged with the overwhelming odor of burning human flesh; and beneath that, the stench of flaming tires and oil and eucalyptus trees. Incredibly, Meg could still catch the faint traces of her own perfume beneath the coppery odor of blood as it ran down her face.

  They had arrived at dusk, her favorite time of day. The stillness reminded her of Heaven; sandalwood scented the air and the monkeys rustled in the lush forest overgrowth. She and her tiny charges, at five and six the youngest boarders at Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy, had been on their way to mass.

  From the jungle, masked men rushed them, shrieking and shooting their weapons. The girls had screamed and run off in all directions, only to be caught by the soldiers and dragged back into a huddle.

  Then they came at Meg like orang pendek, half-man, half-beast, in a blur of rifles and masks and fists. The little girls stood all in a row, watching, as the invaders beat her, and worse. More than once, she forced herself not to give in to the luxury of losing consciousness. She had to do everything she could to protect her girls.

  Hours went by. They would let her rest in her own blood on the ground, then revive her and start her torture all over. They asked nothing of her. The sky had lowered and all traces of daylight were gone. The night was alive with fires. The dormitories were on fire; the church itself, an old Dutch colonial mission, was a smoldering ruin.

  Finally one of them grabbed her hair and yanked back her head. He held a machete to her throat that was caked with dried blood.

  “Where is the pustaha lakak?” he asked in a garbled voice.

  She was stunned. She actually laughed in despair. The man smacked her hard against the cheek with the flat side of the blade.

  “Tell us, or one by one we’ll kill the girls.”

  She fought to get her hysteria under control. But in a hideous way, this was all unbearably funny. It was like hearing one of those ghoulish stories about an arsonist who died lighting a birthday cake. Only this was happening to her and her little girls; this was really happening to her.

  “It doesn’t exist,” she managed, and another round of uncontrollable laughter threatened to bubble out of her. She opened her swollen eyes, but everything was bloody and clouded. “It’s a myth.”

  Local legend had it that an Irishwoman had come here years before and made love to a buried god. It had driven her mad. She spent the rest of her life walled up inside the church, scribbling insanely in a pustaha lakek, a magick book.

  In Indonesia, such books were written on bark, usually in Sanskrit. No matter to the legend that this woman wouldn’t know anything about Sanskrit, and certainly wouldn’t have gotten hold of a blank book made of bark.

  Be that as it may, this pustaha lakek was reputed to describe the nature and being of Latura, ancient God of the Dead. The original teachings of Latura had been handed down by a Badui village woman who had come to live among the Nias. Her descendants, it was claimed, learned all the words of the unholy teachings by rote.

  Then the Irishwoman had arrived and written everything down. Then Latura possessed a sacred Book, as did many gods of antiquity whose worship had been refined and passed down through the spoken word for generation upon generation.

  To bring Latura forth, one must precisely chant the proper spells and incantations, and perform the correct sacrifices. It was a given that Latura required many sacrifices. After all, his earliest worshipers had been cannibals and headhunters.

  But in attempting to call Latura forth, the mad Irishwoman’s heart had caught fire. She had burned to death, from the inside out. The Book, however, had not burned. If one dug up her skeleton, they would find charred arms clasping the bark book to her rib cage.

  Meg’s spiritual adviser, Father Hendrik, had confided to Meg that they had indeed found a book buried with a charred fifty-year-old female skeleton, in 1983. But it was a Christian Bible the bony arms had held, not a damned book of the Devil. Meg realized now that the story must have gotten out — most likely, the servants had talked — and now someone very evil had come for the Book of Latura.

  Father Hendrik, always her rock in times of trouble — he had married her parents and baptized her and all her brothers and sisters — lay in the infirmary on this night of terror. He had been ailing for the last six days from some mysterious malady. The local dukun insisted that he had been cursed by an enemy. Meg was shocked to realize that despite her upbringing in the church, she was convinced that the leader of these men was the one who had made Father Hendrick sick. With evil magick, and through traditional, forbidden rituals.

  “Where is the Book?” they demanded, over and over, hitting her savagely each time they repeated the question. They threatened to fling her into the burning church, along with the children.

  Then they dragged Father Hendrik from his sick bed. She was shocked to see him in his hospital gown, his bright red hair nearly gone, his face wasted and gray. He was little more than a skeleton himself, when a week ago, he had been vigorous despite his years.

  They saw each other. His look of shock must have been as great as her own.

  “Mary Margaret,” he groaned, using her Christian name. He raised a shaking hand and tried to make the sign of the cross. One of
the men socked him on the shoulder. Father Hendrik cried out and stumbled forward.

  “Tell us, or he dies,” the leader said.

  “Meg, don’t,” Father Hendrik blurted.

  The leader threw back his head and laughed.

  “So, do you still claim that there’s no Book?” he demanded, cuffing Meg.

  She stared in bewilderment at the priest. Of course there was no Book. Or had he lied to her?

  “He knows where it is,” the leader announced.

  They turned all their cruelty on the priest. Meg blacked out as his screams reached fever pitch.

  When she came to, they had bound him hand and foot. He was lying beside her. His hospital gown was soaked with his blood. His face barely looked human, it was so bruised.

  He looked straight at her and said softly, “There’s a kris.” Quickly, he glanced back at his torturers, who had not heard. “I don’t know where it is.”

  Then they held her head and made her watch as they pushed him into the smoldering church.

  In the absence of a blaze, it took him a long time to die.

  The dozen Dutch and Dutch-Indonesian nuns were next.

  The leader sent men to her village, taunting her, describing in detail what they would do there. Hours later they returned with her father’s head.

  After what they had done to Meg, she prayed that her mother, a religious woman, was dead as well.

  Then it was almost dawn. The leader said, “I applaud your loyalty to whatever sorcerer you serve. We were told of your strong blood ties to the Book. But the time has come to tell us the rest. Or with first light, our master will eat your soul. Believe me, death is far preferable.”

  She was confused. Blood ties? “What rest? What is the rest?” she begged.

  What had happened next, Meg had always assumed was a delusion brought on by terror and pain.

  Silhouetted by firelight, the leader clapped his hands. As one, he and all his men tore off their masks

  As one, she and the little girls screamed. Meg vomited blood.

  She had never seen anything more revolting in her life. Their faces were a sickly, diseased green, their foreheads and cheeks slashed with deep, red welts that pulsed and oozed. Their eyes were elongated and yellow, the pupils narrow and lozenge-shaped. They darted and hissed at her like poisonous snakes.