Colin Cotterill - The Coroner's lunch

Siri was shaking his head. The quiet of the morning was invaded by the sounds of last night’s ceremony: The villagers were chanting his name. A woman was crying; it was Lao Jong’s wife lying over his body.

The morning was losing its warmth. The sun through the window had fallen behind a cloud.

“It’s so real.”

“Put this on, Yeh Ming. Put this on and it will all go away.”

“I can’t. For some reason I know I shouldn’t. There’s something wrong here.”

“You must trust me.” She was losing her patience with him. Her voice became deeper.

“How do you know they talked of revenge?” The tiniest drip of blood appeared at the corner of her mouth, and Siri understood. The night was not intruding into the morning; the morning was intruding into the night. He wasn’t imagining he was strangling Suab. He actually was. That was the reality. The soft bed, the kind Suab, and the soup, was an image forced into his head by Phibob .

The malevolent spirits were lulling him, coaxing him to put on the amulet to weaken him. It was their only hope. He had Suab by the neck and he was casting the spirits from her. They couldn’t withstand his power. They’d killed the medium, but Yeh Ming was too strong. He removed one hand from Suab’s neck and with inhuman ferocity slapped her across the face.

“Be gone, Phibob. Be gone.”

And gone they were, in a rush of static that sucked the air from the room. Suab’s body became limp, and Yeh Ming let it drop. He looked around at the silent villagers, who held their palms together and cast their tear-filled eyes downward. His work was done. Slowly he crumpled to the ground and slept.

When he awoke he heard the sound of a spoon clanking against a pot but didn’t dare look. He heard the sound of soup pouring into a bowl and tried not to listen.

“He’s awake.”

It was a man’s voice and it was answered by the grunt of another. Siri looked up to see some of the elders sitting in a huddle at the far side of the hut. They got to their feet and hurried across the room. They seemed pleased to see him. The young girl he’d met before was dishing up soup for everyone. It smelled good.

Siri said nothing to the men. He watched them. He looked for abnormalities, anything out of place, sudden changes in the light. Tshaj spoke first.

“How are you feeling, Yeh Ming?” The voice seemed legitimate, but Siri wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice.

“Who are you?”

The men looked at each other, confused. “I’m Tshaj. What’s wrong?”

“What year is this?”

“1976.”

“The date?” Siri figured a malevolent spirit wouldn’t have an up-to-date calendar.

The elders looked at one another again. Unfortunately, dates weren’t something they needed to concern themselves with either. One of them took a stab at it.

“November?”

“What day?”

“Monday.”

“No. That isn’t possible. What happened to Friday and Saturday and Sunday?”

“You slept through them.”

“You’ve been out like a clod of earth since…that night.”

It wasn’t unlikely. He felt leaden and uncommonly hungry. The smell of the soup was bringing on rumbling in his insides. But he still wasn’t absolutely at peace with what he was seeing.

“Where’s Lao Jong?”

Tshaj looked down at his hands. “He’s gone.”

“Gone, dead? From the exorcism?”

The men nodded solemnly.

“He wasn’t in physical condition to tolerate all that turmoil he was hosting. He’d never really done it before, not to that degree. He had a bad heart already, and the Phibob could tell. I can’t think what they made him see that shocked him so. Not sure I’d want to know.”

“I can imagine.”

“Lucky for us, Yeh Ming was open to the deities. There was the devil of a battle.”

“I think I met that devil. What happened to the Phibob ?”

“Back to the forest.”

“Just like that? They just happily scurried back to the forest with their tails between their legs?”

“There’ll be nothing happy about it. There’s still a lot of mischief to be had in the jungle. But they’ll think twice about possessing any of us, now that we’re protected. Yeh Ming left us a blessing and put a spell on our village.”

“Nice of him.” Siri decided this was reality, if only because his stomach was bleating like a tethered goat from the aroma of the soup. Recovering from seventy-two hours of sleep is no easy matter, and he needed help from the elders to sit up. They were flesh and blood, but mostly bone. The blushing girl spooned soup into his mouth. He could have done it himself, but he rather liked the service.

“What about the captain?” he asked between slurps.

“He was blessed too. It seemed to make him very confident. He decided to protect his men as well. Auntie Suab’s doing a roaring trade in amulets for the army. She can’t make them fast enough.”

Siri stopped eating. “Auntie Suab? Is she all right?”

“She’s fine. She knows nothing about that night. The host can feel nothing. Once you exposed her, she was unconscious and the Phibob took over.”

“But I was…wasn’t I choking her to death?”

“No. You were attacking the Phibob . They weren’t your hands and it wasn’t Suab’s throat.”

“Thank goodness for that. Feed me, my sweetness.”

The girl blushed and spooned more soup into his mouth.

Once he had shaken the sleep from his body, and the food had re-stoked his energy, Siri felt better than he had for many years. Perhaps he felt better than he ever had. Something was stirring inside him that made him think of youth, of his romance with Boua. It was a marvelous feeling.

An hour after waking, he was walking around Meyu Bo receiving small gifts and congratulations and saying his good-byes. At Suab’s hut he apologized again, but it was certain she neither remembered nor felt a thing. She had no idea what he was talking about when he mentioned the trick she’d played. She handed him a small leather pouch, which he accepted cautiously.

“This isn’t a black prism?”

“No, Yeh Ming. That was destroyed. Smashed to a thousand pieces and scattered over the forestry site. Take a look.” He pulled the drawstring and found a white talisman inside, smaller than the prism but every bit as ancient. It hung on a string of plaited white hair. “This is the converse of the black prism. Where there’s evil, you’ll see it. No spirit can blind you, if you have this.

“I hope the Phibob is finished with you, but it’s a wicked spirit, an amalgam of many malevolent souls. The exorcism probably showed him who’s boss, but I want you to be prepared for revenge. If he chooses to follow up on the curse, you’ll need this. Promise me you’ll carry it with you always.”

A feeling of deja vu came over him, although it seemed unreasonable. Auntie Suab wasn’t Phibob. She was offering him her help. It was just that, if she had no recollection of the possession, how did she know about the curse? He dismissed the thought.

He thanked her for the amulet but had no intention of carrying it with him. He wished her well with her amulet sales, and hoped they would bring in enough revenue for the village to reverse its slide into poverty. There were an awful lot of soldiers, and superstition spread faster than a forest fire.

Later that afternoon, Kumsing escorted Siri to the airstrip. The captain did indeed seem to be a new man. His nervous tic was gone, and he was wearing his uniform with resolute defiance. His own amulet peeked out from between the straining buttons.

They watched the Yak approach from the horizon, like a bee full of pollen. Siri and Kumsing walked toward it with their arms around each other’s shoulders like survivors of a great ordeal.