Girl
ONCE, AT JING'S house, they'd been watching a movie—not Star
Wars, for once. It was meant to be a romance, one of those will-they-
won't-they setups that you know are actually a they-will-because-
they're-the-two-best-looking-people-on-the-screen types. Jing,
surprisingly, was a sucker for sappy movies. Only this one kept
stuttering and skipping, until Jing popped it out of the DVD player
and buffed it vigorously with her sleeve.
The next phase of Pink's haunting made Suraya's life jump like a
scratched-up DVD. Swathes of time would pass in the space of a
blink, without her even realizing it.
Skip.
There they were at the table, Mama and Suraya, and Suraya was
silently rearranging the rice and sambal jawa and freshly fried fish
into shifting patterns on her plate, trying to make it look like she was
eating.
Skip.
She opened her eyes to find herself in the shower, gasping and
spluttering under the furious spray, lungs desperate for air, the skin
on her fingers and toes wrinkled to the consistency of raisins. How
long have I been standing here?
Skip.
And now she was in her bedroom, sitting at her plain wooden
desk, her sketchbook open before her, pen in hand. There was a
picture on the page in front of her: an intricate tangle of flowers and
leaves and vines in stark black ink on the snowy paper. Did I draw
that? She must have, somehow, only . . . only she couldn't quite
remember.
She stared at the page and sighed.
Something on the page sighed back.
Suraya's heart began to pound hard in her chest, a rhythmic
thudding that echoed in her ears.
Beneath the flowers, somewhere in the dark spaces where the
vines and the leaves intertwined, something began to move.
She could see it, dark and writhing, and she could hear it, its
breath a wet, heavy rasping, and she could feel it, most of all—an icy
coldness in the tropical heat of her bedroom, a hole ripped in the
canvas of reality. Its movements were slow and sinuous, and she
couldn't shake the feeling that it was coming closer to the surface,
ready to break free of its paper prison.
The movement stopped, and it was like the entire world held its
breath.
Then slowly, softly, ink began to bleed in thin little lines down the
page, from the very center of her drawing down, down, down to the
bottom of the page. From there, it moved in steady streams and
rivulets across the desk, pooling in the dings and scratches on the
surface on its way to the edge. And then finally, it began to drip
steadily onto the floor at Suraya's feet.
And though she trembled like a leaf in a storm, she stayed where
she was, first because she was so afraid, and later because she
couldn't move if she wanted to. The ink that puddled on the floor
grabbed at her feet, tiny strings of black reaching up to latch onto her
skin, weaving a net to keep her where she was. Then as she
watched, it slowly began to creep up her legs, turning everything it
touched black as midnight, steadily laying claim on her body as if it
was its own to take.
Just as she felt the slick touch of it on her neck, she heard a
voice whisper in her ear, a voice that sounded remarkably like Pink's.
You will not be rid of me so easily.