Smoking Poppy by Graham Joyce (the read aloud family .txt) 📕

us. Was Jack playing with me? Had he approved of his nephew’s actions?

He seemed to study my response. ‘But we can’t do that,’ he continued, ‘because your daughter won’t come out. So he’s going to help her. Two days from now is a full moon. A good night to frighten the spirits away.’

‘Moon!’ said Khiem, floating a finger skyward.

‘Khiem says your daughter has to pass through the spirit gate on that night to make her peace with the Lord of the Moon.’

I shook my head. ‘But as you say, the problem lies in getting Charlie to come out of the hut at all.’

At this point Phil wandered out of the hut rubbing his hands, sweating, agitated. Jack spoke to Khiem. He addressed me directly while Jack translated; but as he did so Jack kept his eyes trained on Phil. ‘He says you are her father. Only you know the way to speak to her. Family thing.

‘He says the villagers will help, and he will do everything he can. He will summon good spirits to chase the bad spirits away. But the solution is in your hands. He has a lot of preparation to do before then and she must be ready in two nights to pass through the spirit gate or the moment will be lost. He says Charlie has gone into the belly of her own fear. Khiem says you must make her come out, the way she came out of her mother’s belly.’

Throughout this speech Jack’s gaze hadn’t shifted from Phil.

I looked at Khiem and he nodded at me again. Satisfied with that, the old man got to his feet and hobbled off. Jack too got up. ‘Now I have to send men out into the jungle to look for my nephew. What’s the matter with your son?’ he said.

‘Bad guts,’ I said with a half-smile. ‘Jungle belly.’

Jack turned quickly and walked away. I looked beyond the perspiring Phil and into the hut. Charlie was standing in the doorway. She’d heard everything that was said.

Khiem came back later to renew the candles and the incense. Still he refused to enter the hut. He performed unknowable rituals and fiddled about with the spirit house he’d constructed outside, blowing smoke through its door and hanging tiny bells under its roof.

‘But we’ve got to do something, Charlie,’ I said later, when we were all in our sleeping bags. The candlelight cast shadows along her face as she grimaced at me, and I realised how far she’d come from being a girl. In a certain light she looked old, care-worn, broken.

‘Looks like it’s going to be up to you my girl,’ Mick put in.

Outside, somewhere in the village, another pig was being slaughtered. Its high-pitched squeal was almost human.

‘I want to do it, really I do,’ Charlie said. ‘I want to do it for all of us. But I can’t.’

‘You can if you pray for help,’ Phil insisted. ‘Each prayer is a step on the way to the open air.’

Charlie shook her head, and I asked her what she thought about the photographs. I suggested it was not the mistake made on the night of the eclipse that was keeping her here, but Khao’s crude sorcery. I asked her if she thought Khiem might be able to answer the spirits for her. Hell, it was all mumbo-jumbo, but it was where she was at.

‘You seem pretty sure that Khao is out of the way now,’ Charlie said.

‘I have a feeling,’ I answered, ‘that he’s one bad spirit who won’t bother you any more.’ I was confident that rapist number two was about to get his payback.

Phil was disgusted by this talk. ‘Only one spirit can help us, and that’s the Holy Spirit of the Lord. I don’t like this talk of trafficking in demons.’

I discussed with Charlie everything Khiem had said through Jack; the stuff about making peace with the Lord of the Moon. Good spirits and bad spirits. We talked about what it might mean, and how, looked at a certain way, you could make sense of it. Behind this talk the squealing pig seemed to be taking an awful long time to die.

‘He’s giving you a chance to put things right,’ Mick said. ‘To make amends for that business during the eclipse.’

‘I know that!’ Charlie said testily. ‘Don’t you think I don’t understand?’

‘The only way to make amends is through the Lord,’ Phil added angrily.

‘But what he’s saying is … what he’s offering is …’ Mick was having trouble getting his point across. ‘The thing is … Christ! How long are they going to take to kill that pig?’

We stopped talking, and the four of us lay back in our sleeping bags. The high-pitched squeals got more intermittent, but no less piercing. No one said it, but I think all of us realised it at the very same moment.

No pig.

34

I winced when the first puncture was made in my arm, and Khiem smiled broadly. He was starting to smile at me a lot, and this made me slightly nervous. The incisor made three holes in my biceps skin, and the three holes bubbled with tiny beads of blood mixed with blue jungle-plant dye. He moved the instrument down carefully, measuring the distance with an accurate eye, and plunged the incisor into my arm again. Khiem had arrived outside our hut shortly after sun-up, clapping his hands, whistling and calling us out.

Mick, no stranger to the tattoo parlours of the English Midlands, said, ‘Even I felt that one.’

‘Wizards that peep and that mutter,’ Phil said. ‘Sorcerers that—’

‘Don’t you ever give it a rest?’ I was smarting, and Phil’s increasingly obscure remarks only set my teeth on edge.

‘Leave him,’ Mick said. ‘Leave him alone.’

Phil, regarding the whole thing as barbaric, slipped away. I was still panicky that he would do something stupid, but this tattooing had given me something else to think about. And we all needed something else to think about.

I was second up. Charlie had been first.