Horror in Paradise Read online

  Mechanically I reached for the lunch basket and opened it. When I looked again at the mast, the girl was gone. A moment of anxiety struck me—was she a warning? Was Tommy ill? Then I scolded myself. I didn’t believe in such things; I didn’t believe in apparitions or omens. Tom shouted, “What are you waiting for?” I unpacked the sushi and barbecued chicken. The men moved toward me on the trampoline. Tom looked at my face. “Something wrong?”

  “Yes,” I said and tried to smile. “I saw a ghost.”

  “That’s possible,” Gary said. “You’re not the first one. This boat has its own ghost—it was here when I bought it”

  “What kind of ghost?” My breath faltered.

  “I’m not sure. I never saw it. Somebody said a girl. There was some kind of accident with the first owner.”

  I forced myself to pass the chicken around and to pour the wine in paper cups. I told myself to be calm. But the rest of the trip was agony—a kind of nightmare in broad daylight and on the blue of the sea.

  The next day Tommy’s teacher called. She told me he wouldn’t eat. The doctor had said that they might have to force-feed him. “But we don’t know if he will stand it. He is quite rigid and unyielding, yet at the same time passive.” I told his teacher I would come.

  He was lying on his bed. His pale face made his eyes and hair seem even darker. He was utterly listless and took no notice of my presence. There was not even the usual stiffening. I touched his hand. He seemed to have traveled beyond human hope into a hibernating animal world. Perhaps it was a relief to him. I wished suddenly—with horror—that he could die. My mouth went dry and chalky. It was the first time I had admitted the idea of his death. But I knew it had lain dormant in a recess of my brain. Death would be release. For the child—for Tom, for me. But death cannot be made to come. His little heart was young and strong. He might try to starve himself. But medicine would cope with this small organism. I shocked myself—Tommy an organism. I trembled and tears flooded my eyes. The teacher patted me on the shoulder. “They go through all kinds of stages.”

  I knelt by the bed and stroked his forehead. It seemed cold. He looked at me—his eyes were empty, almost like eyes which are all pupil, a dark hole.

  The teacher said, “We have recently found him curled up under his bed or in a closet, like a little animal in a lair.”

  “I don’t want him to go to a hospital,” I said. “I hope you can take care of him here.”

  “He’s no care. He just lies here and submits to anything we do for him—except eating. Most of his stiffness and stubbornness have gone.”

  “Maybe he is wiser than we are.”

  The teacher was puzzled and faintly shocked at something she didn’t want to grasp in my words.

  I walked from the school into the hot July sun. I felt all shriveled up. It was as if my body had never carried the child lying on that bed. As if I were an aged woman carrying only death in me. I had given birth to death. If only he could die. And then, intruding on my despair, coming down the street, I saw the girl in the red gauze blouse. She was walking with a boyfriend and they held hands.

  I watched as she went alone into Tommy’s school. The friend waited near the front steps. In about five minutes she returned. She was smiling. Her smile seemed to me strange and somehow sinister. He took her arm. I followed them.

  Her arrogance was still in her fine vigorous form. I had a fantasy of the two young people having a whole stream of beautiful children with dark hair and sturdy bodies. The children would grow naturally and comfortably. I remembered how her apparition had leaned against the mast of Gary’s catamaran. Like a sign, an omen. But—of what? I told myself that I made too much of an illusion—it was all in my imagination. This ordinary Hawaiian girl was no chiefess, no ghost. In spite of the noble arrogance of her carriage.

  I followed the young couple almost as if I had been bidden. Tommy was pushed out of my mind. They continued to hold hands. Now and again they stopped to kiss lightly. I could see that she dominated him, that he was enslaved. She would make him miserable ultimately. She would always blossom elegantly and arrogantly. She was a chiefess—yes, that I would have to admit. She would always have her way. I hated her for what she would do to him. He was a fine-looking young man, slender with black curling hair. Tommy might have grown up to be like him.

  At the edge of the neighborhood shopping mall, they turned into McDonald’s restaurant. I followed. They laughed, drank cokes, ate their hamburgers slowly. Two tables away I had a hamburger and coffee. I gulped the hot drink, not touching the sandwich. My mind cleared. I stood up and without putting the trash in the bin walked out the door. I could feel their attention upon me. But in my mind’s eye I could see Tommy lying quiet and cold upon his bed.

  The moment in the fast-food place was a turning point of sorts. It was a moment of the everyday, of the usual human round of morning, noon, and night. I thought if Tommy weren’t sick, he and I could sit together at McDonald’s. For him it would be a treat—as it was for all the children in the restaurant, and for the girl in the red blouse and her boyfriend. We would sit on the plastic chairs at the plastic tables and gaze at plastic ferns hanging over planter boxes; we would eat hamburgers and french fries; we would be ordinary people—a mother and her small son—having a little treat. Everyday people just like everyone else. Why should I hate a little boy who couldn’t be like everyone else—who couldn’t do the simplest small thing? He could only curl up like an animal in a lair. The girl—that beautiful proud tall young woman—would know, I thought, what I couldn’t know. She was close to grass and sea and mountain. She could reach him—because of her long dark hair, her tan skin, her whole self which, though proud, would yield to a little boy who had Tommy’s need.

  Sometimes it was comforting to think of Tommy as a small animal. A creature wild and delicate, and yet responsive to words and touch. Once I broke through Tom’s barrier about the child to tell him, thinking it might help. He said I was on dangerous ground. “An animal can respond,” he said. “Tommy can’t. Just stay with what he is. We must learn to accept him—and after a while forget him.”

  I hated such a reasonable approach to Tommy. It was cold and negative, as if he had no existence. Therefore I had no existence—not even as a mother. Tommy remained a part of my flesh—as if he were an arm ora foot. I know this was an absurd notion. But it was real. I remembered his baby head in my hand—now at times the monstrous dream head. There were other dreams, when his head was a boat shaped like a scallop shell which drifted on sea and in air and passed right through my body as if I were a wraith.

  That was why the coffee and hamburger had become important—and even the girl in the red blouse. They were real and concrete. I saw the girl occasionally as I walked to Tommy’s, sometimes with and sometimes without her friend. Her appearance continued to fascinate me—her carriage and her languor. I felt certain she must have chiefly blood. She reminded me of the portrait of the great chiefess Liliha, leaning on the shoulder of her husband Boki. Both of them had the romantic, noble-savage grace an English artist had imagined in the early nineteenth century. The girl seemed almost a reincarnation.

  I speculated about why she appeared so frequently in our neighborhood. But whenever I tried to draw a fantasy around the fact, I stopped myself. There was too much fantasy in my life already.

  I formed the habit after visiting Tommy of eating a hamburger. She had started that, and I was grateful she had given me this odd touchstone. This strange comfort. She reminded me of how things actually are, how one eats and sleeps and grieves over a child like Tommy. So I ate the hamburger and watched whenever she came in, which she often did. And I envied her. I envied the stream of vigorous children latent in her body. How one dislikes a person whom one envies!

  One day when I went to visit Tommy, the teacher said that the new aide, Lani, was with him. “She’s very good with Tommy. You might like to watch them for a few minutes before you go in.”

  I went to his closed d
oor, which had a small window for observation. I looked in. Tommy was seated on a mat on the floor. His head was bent over. Across from him sat a young woman in a pale blue uniform. Her head, the hair in a neat bun, was bent too. They both examined a pile of blocks lying between them. She pointed at one. Slowly Tommy put out his hand, his first finger pointing. With a darting movement he touched the block and then pulled back. She took his hand and guided it again toward the block. She spoke. His hand remained above the block, suspended awkwardly. She seemed to be coaxing him. Slowly he lowered his fingers. He touched the block with a fingertip. “Good!” I could hear her say. She looked up, and I saw her face. The girl in blue was the girl in the red gauze blouse.

  My first impluse was to rush into the room and snatch Tommy away. But I didn’t. I didn’t really want to. I continued to observe. Tommy stood up. He kicked at the blocks—his face impassive as it usually was, with the small lips pulled tight. Lani said something. He kicked again and began to walk over the blocks. One turned under his feet and he fell. She was quick to lift him up and take him on her lap. He did not cry. She held his head as I had once held it, cushioned tenderly in her hand. He lay quietly in her arms. His head was beautiful: the dark eyes, the dark curly hair, the skin that no longer seemed to have a pallor. Lani must have had him out in the sun. He was hers. He belonged to her, I was convinced. A wave of hate spread like a chill through my body. She had possessed him so easily, so comfortably. I couldn’t do it. I never could!

  I walked away, out the door of the school and straight to McDonald’s. I ate a hamburger. It was delicious. I listened to the people around me speaking their little bits of gossip. I watched the children squirming in chairs too large for them, munching on buns. The spasm of hate disappeared. I was happy.

  At home Tom asked, “How is Tommy?”

  “Fine. He’s just fine.”

  Yao Shen

  Emma de Fries and

  Queen Emma of Hawaii

  A series of esoteric exchanges in recent years between a full-blooded Chinese woman and a part-Hawaiian counterpart is narrated by a former University of Hawaii professor to whom manifestations appeared on the fifteenth floor of a Honolulu apartment house.

  Yao Shen (1912-1985), born in Chekiang, China, earned a bachelor’s degree in English at Yenching University, Peiping, in 1935. Coming to the United States on a graduate scholarship, she received a master’s degree at Mills College and an Ed. D. at the University of Michigan. She served at that institution as a professor until coming to the Manoa campus of the University of Hawaii in 1962. There she taught and carried on research in linguistics until her retirement as a professor of English in 1977. She taught at a dozen other centers in America and abroad, and published nearly one hundred professional papers.

  Her one excursion into personal revelations concerning the spirit world was circulated under the pseudonym of “Shin Ling,” meaning “heart” and “spirit.”

  I FIRST met these two distinguished ladies when Emma Alexandria K. de Fries came to bless the Contessa apartment house, a thirty-seven-floor highrise on South King Street, Honolulu, on September 24, 1971. The Contessa had been recently constructed on land that included a Hawaiian churchyard and a cemetery, from which the bones had been cleared away. The builders had held an elaborate groundbreaking ceremony that began with a blessing of the site by the minister of Kawalahao Church, which owns the land, first in Hawaiian and then in English. He was followed by a Japanese Shinto priest, who blessed the four directions. A Chinese lion dance and firecrackers concluded the event.

  During construction, however, more bones were found, so the minister gave another blessing, and the bones were reinterred according to his specifications. Later I was pleased to learn that he too was buying an apartment at the Contessa; but, then, after undergoing lung surgery, he decided not to live there. After moving to my own apartment in May, 1971, I learned something that was even more distressing: the Contessa was haunted. People claimed to be seeing ghosts, and soon strange things began to happen to me.

  One mid-morning in June, for example, as I was walking along the Contessa side of King Street on my way to the nearby University of Hawaii, I saw a dark, neatly dressed lady standing at the intersection of Kahoaloha Lane, where there was a pedestrian walk but no traffic light. She appeared to be waiting for traffic to clear so that she could cross; and, thinking it easier for drivers of cars to see two people walking together than one in the pedestrian walk, I joined her with a smile. She too was Oriental, but she did not respond; and while in the walk she lingered behind me singing. Before we got to the other side of the street, she told me to go back to China, my homeland. She continued in this vein for a very long block until we got to the bus stop at the comer of King Street and University Avenue. By that time, I was so upset that I did not know whether to go on to the campus or to return to my apartment. When I tried to walk away from the bus stop, she was right behind me. And when I turned and walked back, she did the same. People waiting on the benches watched us, until the bus arrived and I got on. From the bus, I could see her sauntering away, and I noticed that she carried nothing in her hand, such as a purse or a bag. I was still so shaken that I resolved from then on to walk only on the Contessa side of King Street and leave the other side to her.

  But it did not work. Early one morning three months later I noticed another strange person, this time with rather dark skin, crossing Dole Street against the light as cars from all four directions stopped and waited. There were bits of dried grass on the person’s left ankle; and again nothing in the person’s hands. From behind, I could not tell if it was a male or a female, but I concluded that, whichever it was, the person must have slept the night on the ground. Then it seemed gradually to take on the shape of a woman, who, while I was waiting to cross with the signal, had reached the other side of the street, where she turned around, stared at me, and waited. I crossed over with the crowd that had been waiting for the light, and then she, too, seemed to be following me. I stopped; she stopped. On the campus I paused to look at a long flight of steps in front of Bachman Annex; she did the same. I turned around to look at her; she stood still and looked at me. She appeared to want me to do something for her but said nothing. Since I did not know what else to do, I walked on; she followed, close behind—until I quickly turned onto a crowded pedestrian walk where I was able to lose her.

  Back at the Contessa, a noise that had been building up was now deafening. It sounded as if tons of bricks and mortar were ceaselessly being poured down the rubbish chute outside my door from the building’s topmost floor, day and night. And when I perceived that other residents of the building heard nothing, I understood that something must be wrong with me, or with my apartment, and that I must do something about it at once.

  Since I did not understand Hawaiian customs, I assumed that all the appropriate measures had been taken to ensure a peaceful life at the Contessa; and now I did not know what more could be done. As I worried and fretted and sought uncertainly for a solution, I developed acute hypertension. One day when my physician and I were talking in my apartment, the seven floor-to-ceiling glass windows and doors rattled and banged so loudly they seemed about to shatter—but only for me, because he heard nothing. At this point, he recommended Emma de Fries, a hum nui, or high priestess (one with deep wisdom of the spirit), whom he knew to have taken care of similar problems after more orthodox treatments failed.

  When she asked me about myself over the telephone next morning, I told her that I had come from mainland China in 1936 and to Honolulu in 1962; that I was a traditional Chinese constantly remembering heaven, earth, and my ancestors; and that I lived close to the Invisible. Every now and then, since childhood, I said, I had seen a white-robed guardian angel, who at times would speak to me. Immediately sensing the state I was in, Emma assured me that she would be at the Contessa that afternoon. I told her I would meet her by the Contessa and she could not miss me; I always wear my short hair straight, and a Chinese dress—in the
style of 1936.

  As I waited, a car pulled up with a large woman in a red gown at the wheel. Bound around her head were two strands of small cowrie shells, and her eyes looked very strange. I was seized with the feeling that one has when meeting a close relative not seen for some time, and that I had a million things to tell her. When she got out of her car, I noticed that below her long voluminous red gown she was also wearing red tabis (mitten socks) and zoris (thongs) with black velvet straps. The two ends of a wide red band around her neck hung down past her knees. When I looked up, her eyes were still funny. Plainly funny.

  As we walked into the building, Emma told me that she knew of the problem at the Contessa: a small one which could be easily taken care of, she said. The bones that were disturbed during construction belonged to three people who were not happy with the blessing they had received. In the lobby she noted the structure of the building, and as I lingered with her I could feel all around her a strong outpouring of warmth. Heavy and tall, she looked like the old pictures one sees of Hawaiians of special importance. But her eyes were different from those of any human face that I had seen in all my sixty years. They appeared to have merged into one single eye which had grown in size to cover her face from temple to temple, eyebrow to cheek. “There is nothing wrong with your place,” she said, as soon as we reached the entrance to my apartment on the fifteenth floor, “but I’ll bless it anyway.”

  “Please do not,” I replied. “I don’t want you to bless my place only. I want you to bless the entire site. If you bless the site, my home will be included, the home of everyone else, and our common domain. My father always said, ‘No amount of wealth can make me feel rich, if all around me are poor relatives.’ How can I be happy in my own home, if I’m surrounded by unhappiness?”