Peace in the Land of the Dead
Lian Dousel
Many years before I died, before the story of how my spirit turned wicked became a tale told by mothers to frighten their children into obedience, there was another tale told to me. It was of the spirit of a young mother turned into a grotesque and wicked monster, living in the darkness of the Woods beyond our hill. She would come to prowl our village nooks on moonless nights, eyeing children to steal, to fill the pit left in her by the death of her own child long ago.
The monster, so the tale went, was once a girl whose beauty could only be compared to the melancholy of monsoon sunsets. One day, not long after her very first blood, she was deemed grown and healthy to take a man. Many suitors from many lands came courting, bearing wine in costly wineskins and meat of the choicest parts, but not a single one of them took her fancy. As winters passed with still no man whose bed she would warm, there came whispers of unknown origin when the full moon passed without a drop of her vestal blood, “She has been to see the dark enticer in the underworld.” And when her belly began to swell, “She has entered a covenant with the enticer—everlasting beauty for a spawn.”
They said the infant was born with two nubs on its forehead, and on that very night, the new mother fled into the dark virgin Woods, forsaking her kith and kin.
Fearing the likelihood of a manifestation of malignance, brave hunters quickly pursued.
The hunt lasted close to twelve full moons, until one dawn they happened upon the two corrupted souls unconscious in sleep. The mother was young and beautiful as ever, but the nubs on the infant’s head had grown into crescent horns.
The hunters recognised the signs of evil, and they slew the mother and child in their sleep. But a sudden cloudburst prevented them from burning the demon spawn and bringing the girl’s body home to be purged, to give her dignity at least in death. So, the hunters escaped the drowning forest without evidence of their success. None in the village questioned their tale. They all believed the evil was gone. However, they said, the unfulfilled bargain kept the young mother’s spirit enchained to the mortal world, dooming her to perpetual grief, fated to search in vain for her lost child. She was barred from the land of the dead so long as she remained without a child to offer the dark enticer.
They said the spirit of the girl had been in limbo so long that she had become corporeal again, with skin made of bark, hair of vines, and eyes of gemstones. The only beauty she still possessed was the laments she would sing on melancholic evenings, that, a time or two, a lone farmer or wayfarer would hear and be entranced. They would wander, bewitched, deep into the Woods, never to be found again.
On some unruly nights when I was a child, my mother would draw my attention to the whistling winds, and she would tell me she could hear echoes of the monster’s wailing in the Woods. She would warn me that the monster was close, looking for a child. If I was rowdy, my mother would say, the monster would take me.
But I was not a child anymore. A few summers ago, a dream provoked in me yearnings that turned me from boy to man. And since I learned the ways in which to delight myself, my mind was not as prone to excitement as it once was by stories of monsters in woods.
There were not many things that evoked collective excitement in our collective lives out in these parts. We had our tasks and our duties to our people and our lands, and we kept to them. But it was an age of new tales.
Those who journeyed down to Vaigam would bring back curious stories about people and lands with strange names that our tongues could hardly say. But before long, we had heard them all, and names like Kalkatta and Gouhati did not sound too strange anymore. One day, however, a returning traveller from our village brought news that reminded everyone of their own childhood, discovering for the first time the immense vastness of the world we were living in.
There had been whispers drifting in from the south, from our Lushai kin, about guests from foreign lands; men with skin white as milk, eyes big and round as a full moon, and hair discoloured not by age or anything known. They said the white men had brought with them stories and songs of someone called Jesu Khrist, curious instruments of music, better ways of commerce, and an abundance of new knowledge. And shortly thereafter, as the bite of winter passed, we heard the white men had crossed River Tuivai and come to a village where our neighbours had relatives, where it was possible for us to see the truth for ourselves.
A handful of us young men rose before the sun and set out westward, none of us discouraged by the five-day journey ahead of us. But the first dusk was barely upon us when we had to turn tail and return. In our eagerness to meet the white men, we had made the mistake of discounting the perils of the westward path snaking through the Woods, the site of many tales of horror, the tale of the wailing mother most common amongst them. We never made it past the Woods.
First, we heard, drifting in with the evening breeze, echoes of a sweet voice humming a mournful strain. We paused and listened for a moment, hoping it was just the breeze, but there was silence as we paused. Then, just as we took another step, the voice came again, closer now and sweeter than before. When one of us began to wander off the beaten path toward that voice into the darkness of the trees, the rest of us who still had our wits took hold of him and rescued him from his bewitchment. Seeing the danger for what it was, we made our way back at once.
Later on, when we were all safe and sound, my companions spoke of the waking dreams and visions of strange qualities that they saw evoked by the voice. They could not describe those dreams, but only compare the feelings they felt to their very first discovery of carnal desire, and that, they said, was testimony to the depth of depravity inherent in the monster.
But I had felt nothing of the sort, only the lament of a tortured girl wishing to ease her enduring misery, that I would again and again be haunted by in the years to come.
We had no need to venture out again to seek the veracity of the white men, for not many moons after that failed treacherous journey, there came messengers from the Lushai Hills, bearing gifts from the world of the white men.
We marvelled at the pages of the volumes on which words were not written with ink but printed. To behold pages upon pages of them, and to be holding them in our very hands—and not only seeing them from afar in the hands of some sorkar messenger, or one of our own adventurous travellers—was almost dreamlike. Some of those pages were written in Lushei-pau, and most in what they called Inglis; they contained songs, and most importantly, the messengers told us, life-changing stories of the often heard about Jesu Khrist.
Those Lushai messengers remained guests of our village chief for some weeks. In that time, they taught many of us to read and write our names in Laimal, what they called the alfabet, and to read and write nambars that they promised would help us with our commerce in no small way. This was the new world that the white men brought, they would remind us. This was only the beginning.
They also taught us Pathian-la, hymns to bring us closer to Jesu. And they taught us new words we had no idea what they meant, like Presbyterian, Missionary, Christianity. Salvation.
What captured us most, however, was that they had come along the beaten path through the dark Woods none of us dared to enter anymore. They even camped a night in the thick of it, and not a whisper did they hear.
They had nothing to fear. Jesu Khrist was watching over them.
The messengers departed with fanfare in about a month, and a few young men from our village accompanied them to go to a school in Aizawl. The rest of us were not left behind. There were more guests, coming from various villages around the Singtang hills, young industrious men who had had a mission education, people who had received baptisma, people on a mission to spread the Good Word, to bring us into the light.
Years passed. I learned to read and write, accepted that Jesu Khrist died long ago for sins I did not know I was so burdened by, and gave credence to the compelling belief that our new God was mightier than the demons of our forebears. But time and again, my mind would drift to the tortured spirit of the girl in the Woods.
The Woods had become a common crossing, the beaten path turned to a road, and the only sounds people heard as they walked the length of the shades were that of the leaves in the wind and the birds nesting within. I walked that road many times, a proper man now with tasks that required me to journey here and there. And every time I walked through the thickness and heard nothing, I wanted to walk again and listen with keener ears, the urge growing stronger each time. My nightly dreams were not free of these hauntings either. I would find myself lost in the Woods, looking for the grieving spirit of that young mother, following the strain of her mournful wailings and the melody of her melancholic laments, until I woke, unsettled and unsatisfied.
Persistent notions and dreams accumulated, but it was when I heard my parents’ whispers one spring night to find me a woman that I lay down to sleep aiming to wake before the first light and venture, alone, out into the Woods to listen for that voice, to hopefully meet the spirit that had haunted me for so long.
* * *
Dew lingered on the blades of grass in the Woods long after sunrise. By noon, when I was well and truly lost, I felt closer to hearing a whisper, and it stirred in me a certain kind of thrill I seldom knew.
But by dusk, the thrill was gone. In its place was a fear, not of the darkness or of the damned monster, but of eternal torment in Hell.
The picture of what awaited at the end of life on earth had been painted so vividly for those of us who were not born-again. I had received baptisma, but the purity gained from it could be easily undone. My furtive attempt to commune with a spirit condemned by everyone as satanic evoked within me a grim premonition.
I began retracing my steps hurriedly while there was still light trickling through the thick canopy. All traces of the sentiment I held when I set out in the morning had vapourised in a holy mist. But the threatening darkness was swift to set in, and safety was far. The grass I had trodden on had risen, the branches I had cut down had grown new limbs, and the clouds had gathered above to hide away the guiding moon and stars.
Very soon, the dark shapes before me transmuted with every breath of wind. The sound of whistling leaves, the breaking of twigs beneath my feet, the call of nocturnal creatures, all rose to a cacophony that mocked my plight.
Then the light completely abandoned me.
I plodded on blindly, hoping to happen upon the road or the footfalls of a traveller, keeping my ears pricked for any sound of a living soul.
Black was all I saw, and my heartbeat all I heard. I began to recite between heavy breaths, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come…”
I repeated the prayer over and over as I groped blindly at the darkness until my mouth was dry and my chest could barely hold a breath. Even when I lost my voice, I continued chanting in stammering gasps.
Then, I heard the wind whisper, “Who is this father of yours in heaven?”
My blood went cold. My body moved on its own. I remembered nothing but the sound of branches and vines swishing in the air as they grabbed for me, of the twigs and leaves crackling as I trampled my way out of the valley of death, and my voiceless breath chanting in rhythm to my steps, “The Lord is my shepherd…” I did not remember how I got out of the darkness. I did not remember reaching the light of the village and entering my home. And when I awoke in the morning in my own bed, the stark awareness that I was alive when I should have been dead made me believe for a brief moment that the Rapture had come, and I had been left behind for the sin I had committed by communing with a condemned spirit.
Maybe it was the lucidity that accompanied the morning light, or maybe it was the company of my good pragmatic Christian folks, but the sudden terror that had robbed me of my senses the night before felt incidental in hindsight. In pitch darkness, aural senses heightened, sometimes to a fault; so what else could that whisper be but the night breeze sifting through leaves?
Days passed and seasons changed. During the days I worked on the farms, and during the nights I sat in church and sang our hymns. I said my prayers with diligence, kept my body busy to keep my mind occupied. But the temporal distance I put between me and the Woods only served to stoke and provoke that familiar feeling of malcontent. My waking hours and dreams were soon haunted once more by that sweet intimate lament heard long ago. No matter how many Psalms I sang or Our Fathers I said, the sentiment only grew with each passing day.
One day, I plotted to venture out into the Woods again.
The brooding monsoon clouds hung dark and heavy as I made my escape from the farms before noon. Although it had been months, having relived my journey into the Woods many times in my head, I was sure of my footing, and very soon I found myself back where the light of day had deserted me, where I was asked by the wind who my father in heaven was.
I roved about for hours, looking into every bush and overgrowth in the vicinity, looking up trees and turning at every sound of the forest. And when it began to drizzle, I took shelter under the branches of a wide tree, never losing hope or temerity.
Finally, almost drowned out by the pitter-patter, there came a familiar voice, “Why are you here?”
The drumming in my chest intensified. All I saw around me was the glistening leaves and barks. I shouted into the rain, “Who are you?”
“You know who I am,” the voice replied, coming from elsewhere now. “You came back. What do you want of me?”
“I want to see you.”
“Is that all you want? To see me?” The voice was closer.
I spoke of our journey long ago, the very first time I heard her sorrow, and I told her how it had haunted me for years. I told her that I wished to see her, to understand, and if I had the means, I wished to help her.
“You cannot help me. No one can. All you can do is hate and fear.”
“I’m not afraid,” I said.
“You will be,” she said, her voice growing fainter in the rain.
“Then let me be afraid,” I shouted so my voice would not disappear in my throat.
There was silence for a long while except for the persistent assault of the rain, the occasional crack of thunder, and the whistling of the winds filtering through the drenched thickness. The earth having drunk all it could, the water collected and flowed, carving its own path in the mud, seeking lower ground. All the green around me palpitated, thick branches sagged under the weight of the rain, and trees swayed in the wet wind, but there was no movement unnatural to my eyes. Until I caught sight of a large piece of bark not far ahead move and separate from the stocky trunk of the tree. Half-obscured by the whiteness of the dense rain, for a moment I thought it was a trick of vision, but then I saw the lichened trunk had two distinguishable limbs it was standing on, two hanging off either side of it, and atop, where its head was supposed to be, there hung a slick mess of dark vines and tendrils from which the rain dripped steadily.
“This is where you flee or faint,” she said, the eerily serene voice barely penetrating the rain.
I had no faculty in my limbs that would help me run, and no drowsiness in my head that might make me faint. I felt my heart race and the cold of the rain amplify, and my eyes were wide and unblinking despite water dribbling into them. I was not afraid.
I stepped out from underneath my porous shelter. The torrent beat down on me, and my feet sank up to my ankles in the puddles and streams. I approached with slow, careful steps while the magnificent creature remained unmoving, almost indistinguishable from its surroundings, waiting, perhaps as curious as I was, or daring me to go as far as I had the valour for, to see what I would do.
I did not know what I would do. I hardly knew I was putting one foot in front of the other.
In the fullness of time, I stood before her still form. Perhaps she was perplexed. Certainly, no mortal had ever beheld her from so close. And I was close enough to see, between the dark tendrils of her hair, her milky eyes gleaming—two dusky gemstones—and in them, ages worth of sorrow.
Slowly, all of my past terror washed away, and I raised my hand cautiously. She remained still as a tree, even as my fingertips brushed against the coarseness of her cheek.
I left my hand there, water running down from her temple to my knuckles, down to my wrist and dripping off my elbow. And as the hollow of my palm pressed lightly against her calloused skin, she closed her eyes, and my heart calmed.
That maiden touch begot a new realm of sensations, both of body and spirit, and in time, a blooming devotion, borne out of our utter familiarity of each other’s dreams and sorrows. Her bliss at having found the end of her tormenting solitude tore down our walls of inhibition, and soon left to abandon were my acquired notions of sin and virtue. From the euphoria we derived in our trysts in the many cloudy days and full moon nights, surrendering my obligations to the world that now felt so distant, there stemmed a boldness that eventually turned to imprudence.
***
I was ignorant of the change in perception that the people of the village had of me. And with my senses consumed, I never even heard echoes of the whispers in my absence of my heretic inclinations.
I did not know I was being stalked.
It was always with preoccupation that I would venture out, rarely looking behind me or brushing away the footprints I was leaving behind. And when I would arrive through the thickets to the hollow of our grove, it was as if nothing mattered other than the presence of my companion. She told me she remembered little of her past; all that remained was a dark and bottomless well of emptiness. Her dreams would offer her hints of a life bygone, the senses and sentiments—of deep yearning, happiness, fear, grief—of a life forgotten ages ago. She did not know at what age she lived a mortal life, if ever she did, or when her transformation began, but the longer we spent in each other’s company, the thorny callouses that had helped her survive for so long began to peel away, revealing to me her gentle humanity that survived her everlasting solitude, and the revelation carried grains of recollection that would throw her deeper into despair. But she remained ignorant of the lore circulating about her in the villages and towns, and I dared not speak a word of it in fear of devitalising her further. What we had was unlike anything the mortal realm had to offer, and it would be foolish to do anything that might spoilt it.
Nearly a year had passed since that maiden touch, and a part of me began to harbour the hope that we might find a blissful place for us between our realms. But sooner came calamity.
I was waylaid on my return from our tryst that night by half the village.
They sat me down and confined me for half the night in our new church while the pastor counselled me. When they let me go, I was reminded by my parents of my foolishness, of their concern about the confusing state of my mind. This was the Lord using me, they reasoned, to take the final stride out of our heathen past. The hope I harboured for my companion sounded, even to myself as I attempted to convey the humanity I felt in her, like a rambling born out of a latent madness. And the more I spoke, the madder I seemed.
That night, I slept guarded by the young and faithful Christian men of our village.
Morning came. I was awoken before sunrise.
I was made to march ahead of the resolute young men, now armed with daos, spears, and Psalms into the Woods. These soldiers of God would once and for all remove the monster’s evil presence from our now sanctified lands so she could no longer pollute any more of us.
My steps were hesitant, and my mind muddy. I hardly realised when we arrived at our grove.
The spirited men waited in the shadows of the bushes. I knelt in the open, praying that she would not show, wishing this was all a dream. Every sound of the forest could have been the sound of her approach, and it endlessly evoked gruesome visions in my mind, until I was taken completely by desperation.
I turned to the shadowy bushes and threw myself down to the earth and pleaded for reason, begged for mercy, even threatened them with retribution, but they saw through me. From the shadows they promised me a fate worse than death. “Your soul will be forfeit,” they said, “and your family will bear the shame and misery of your perversions for the rest of their lives.”
The sun sank low. It was the hour I would appear and she would come to me.
She glided out of nowhere, as she had done many times in our privacy, and she knelt down before me—now with hidden zealous eyes upon us. And when her punishers sprang out from their hiding places with a holy murderous intent, she did not run. It was almost as if she knew, as soon as she saw me kneeling, that her end had come. She came out of the darkness to meet it in repose.
And in the brief dreamlike moment before the spears impaled her heart and the sharp blade of a dao separated her head from her body, she whispered calmly, “I will wait for you in peace in the land of the dead.”
***
The bitter joke that followed was that I was deemed absolved, that I had a direct bond to the Holy Ghost, which, they said, was what led me to convene with the elusive demon so God’s justice could come about. But that was only an illusion. The truth of my perversion was a stain that could not be washed off my nature by any number of prayers or verses. The well of my sin was too deep for anyone who knew me, even my parents, to believe that I might ever climb out of it. Although they might have said I was forgiven and saved, the winds blowing from the Woods, carrying echoes of a wailing, sometimes a lament, would remind them afresh of the loathsomeness of my past indulgence. But for me, there were only silences that desired to be filled, and the only things I could fill them with were a tangle of grief, despondency, and an impotent rage.
The passing of time, or at least the changing of it, manifested in frequent whispers of tales that would once upon a time have animated me—a great war in the world of the white men, where some of our kin were sent to fight against their will; people flying with manmade metal wings; an old man called Gandhi taking salt from the sea, the significance of which none who told it seemed to know; then another war they called the Japan-gaal threatened to arrive at our lands. The only passing of time that did not escape my understanding was the eventual death of my father and then my mother.
Strangely, as I buried them, I felt nothing. But in some unknown way, their successive demises were a catalyst for my ruin, as if they had been my final tethers to the strange new world that had left me behind.
I seldom knew where the morning light would find me. Sometimes it was the emptiness of my house, awoken by the sound of hammering or drilling; but more and more often, it was somewhere out under the familiar canopy, awoken by the sudden roar of engines passing by.
I do not know for how long I drifted back and forth between the dirt of our village to the tall safety of the Woods, and I certainly do not know when exactly it was that I died. I simply happened upon, one day, in the thick of the forest that has become my only home, a rotting corpse that bore my likeness despite the corruption of the flesh. That moment of discovery evoked nothing in me, but a grief would come intermittently, and it was in those moments that, blinded by intense sorrow born out of my solitude more than anything else, I would wander out of the Woods and sometimes find myself haunting the village whose inhabitants had all become strangers. Sometimes that unfamiliarity provoked terror, both in me and those who had the misfortune to catch a glimpse of me. But now, the strangeness of the world I once knew terrifies me, so I have confined myself to the darkness of the Woods, forgetting faces and names one by one as the full moons keep passing. Sometimes I awake and forget that I am yet alive, even though my body has died.
It must have been ages, for the edges of my safety recede. The pines and the teaks I nursed to adulthood have been felled, and now I fear the grove will soon encounter a similar fate, razed to make room for concrete and machines. Where will I go then? What will become of me?
I suppose a kind of death.
I am a spirit out of time and out of place, reduced to grotesque tales of horror and myth that hardly any believe. Shrivelled and moored to my shrinking abode, I await now for a stake to pierce my rotting heart, for a blade to draw my blackened blood, and end my nightmare once and for all, so I could pass on to the land of the dead where, surely, peace awaits.
***
About the Author
Born and raised in the periphery of Lamka, Lian Dousel writes fiction inspired by his background—the folktales, the history of his town and culture, and the people that he calls his people. Growing up on the imaginations of Enid Blyton and the adventures of the Hardy Boys taught him to love his own imagination. Oates, Murakami, and Marquez inspired him to write. But it is the writings of local literary pioneers, people the wider literary culture is all the poorer for not having recognised, like T. Gwite, Tualchin Neihsaial, and Stephen Nangchin, that let him know that writing is imperative.
With a short story published in Out of Print Magazine and one in Mavelinadu Collective, and a master’s degree in Literary Art under the mentorship of author Belinder Dhanoa, Dousel continues to explore and rediscover himself and his community with a short story collection and a debut novel in the works. He is not confined by genre or subject matter, and plans to traverse the wider literary world with his pen and paper.