A Thousand Thousand Islands Hantu! (v1) [PDF]

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Things people have said to me, about hantu: “You do realise that the more you study them, the more they get attracted to you?” “They see you are weird. A little bit like them. That’s why they will leave you alone.”

TEXT ZEDECK SIEW ILLUSTR ATIONS MUN K AO ADDITIONAL ILLUSTR ATIONS SHARON CHIN SPECIAL THANKS ANGELINE WOON SHAR MIL A GANESAN THE R PGMY FACEBOOK GROUP

THE BILANGPINGGANG

You were stubborn. You were warned by your aunt; your father-in-law told you stories. But you really wanted banana fritters. The sounds of the night-bazaar recede. You waddle home, chewing your fried treat. There is the sound of folded wax paper, and the shuffling of your feet. Something lands on the batter, in the spot you just bit. It is a grasshopper. It is bright green, even in the gas-lamp-ed half-dark. It shifts to look at you. You shake it off. You hear a soft caw: a single caw, high up and near. What is that, up on that pole? A thing crouched atop it; wrapped a cloak, feathers perhaps; insinuations of a beak? You walk past it. Things like it are best ignored. A gust of air, and the smell of wet earth – and on the pole in front of you, there it is again. It settles, rewraps its cloth around itself. It looks at you. It turns its beak away from you, because its eyes are at the back of its head. You keep walking. What else can you do? It is not as if you can really run, in your condition. The house is at the end of the street. Ignore it. Do not acknowledge it. Blank it from the world. Perhaps then – God save you – it will leave.

But it follows you, lamp-pole to lamp-pole. And you cannot help but notice details. How its belly spills down between its short, stub legs. It flaps its hands, once, and you see it is wearing a strange skirt: a belt of round things, that could be fruit. Or – if your aunt’s story was true – shrunken infants’ heads. The baby in your belly turns, afraid.

1 How I Became A Psychic Deadweight

Had a very religious upbringing. Evangelical, following in the American vein – so a lot of lurid stuff about “spiritual warfare”. That got merged with the ghost stories my primary-school mates told each other. I remember one story vividly: “Eh, my sister’s boarding school, got this girl, she walked into the toilets at night, she saw this ghost with a long tongue licking period blood off the toilet seat wei!” Obviously, model Presbyterian boy that I was, I wasn’t supposed to pay such backwards beliefs any mind. But then, in Sunday school, they screened “A Thief In The Night”: a 1970s-era Christian horror film about the End Times: world governments, prayer groups guillotined, barcode-marks of the Beast.

So I knew: evil was aboard in the world. It was working its way in. And I thought: that ghost with the long tongue was out there. It was Satan’s servant, some kind of psychosexual devil. I would not sleep – I could not sleep. The ghost with the long tongue was outside my window, waiting to put its mark on me. Working its way in. Eventually, my terror forced my parents to get a reverend and his wife to come pray over me. They held vigil for the night. I remember their spectacles; the reverend wife’s perm-ed hair. Their hands on me; their rolling, droning intercessions; the tongues they spoke. Finally I fell asleep. I’ve never had a supernatural experience, since. Not in any Penang hotel; or in cells of the Melbourne gaol; nor any old PJ bungalow. I think quite a few people have stories about childhood interventions like this. Children see things; a shamanistic figure is brought in to protect them, cure them. Possessions rid by Buddhist monks, kena sampuk but healed by an ustaz, etc.

SANG PAKSA PENYAMUN KRAMAT It begins with a dream. A tapir, a cow-sized animal that – unless you live in the interior – you have surely never seen. A comical creature. Pig-like, but with a gentler mien. Black, but with a white back, as if painted. Prehensile snout; puffingly large nostrils, searching the ground. You dream of the tapir again, the next evening. Now it is closer. It is so harmless-seeming, you let it sniff you. It nuzzles. You see its oddly human teeth. The evening after, the tapir’s touch is playful. It tickles! The bristles on its nose prickle up your thigh. Giggling, you fall over, paralyzed with laughter. It bites you. Mid-scream you start awake. You are wet with sweat. But your blanket is not bloody. The pain was only imaginary – though it was very, very vivid. You look down your pants, to check. The tapir has taken something from you. The shame, the horror. It is difficult for you to speak about your loss. It is such a private thing. You become irritable, withdrawn. Your wife accuses you of seeing a second woman. Eventually you confide in a friend versed in small magics. He nods with understanding. You feel his smile is mocking. Your friend brings you an old house on a hill. A bungalow abandoned for many years. Of course people say it is haunted. You have brought brass amulets and a camphor lamp, as protection.

The inside of the house smells of spoiled gore. Of rotting flesh. Your friend waves the lamp around. Sets of male genitalia – dozens, and dozens – are nailed to the walls. “Which one is yours?” he asks you. “Look for the freshest.” There is movement in one corner. A shadow unfolds, drops to the floor, lands on its hands and feet. It arches, belly-up. It stares at you both with its upside-down head. Its skin eats light. It wears funeral cloth like a sarong; this drapes its legs in white. It is black and white. Like a tapir. It is sniffing.

You shake your amulet in the tapir-thing’s direction. It laughs and snaps bright teeth. In three quick hops it has got your friend on the ground. It is holding him down. Its fingers are tickling, tickling, tickling. Your friend is laughing terribly. Squealing. It bites him.

2 Dead Teenage Girls A truism said, that I enjoy, is this: Given a long enough duration, any conversation between Malaysians eventually turns to ghost stories. ~ Some time ago a friend of ours told us about growing up in her hometown. A teenaged girl had been ritually murdered. She had been assaulted, killed; the killers aimed to dig up her corpse in a few days – to harvest the fat of her chin, for use in blessing a road-building project. Our friend’s parents stood watch over the girl’s grave, with other kampung folk. The killers were a father and his sons, abetted by their families, from the same community. The sons were caught and hanged. Their father fled the country. A grisly story. (And it is always a dead girl, isn’t it?) Our friend was very matter-of-fact. There was dismay in her voice, and dread in our reactions – at the terribleness of people, not terror of the beyond. ~ Well, our friend’s story wasn’t really a ghost story. Then again, neither are most of the ghost stories I’ve heard my other friends tell, over the years. The stories we tell aren’t ghost stories in the way Edo-period kaidan are ghost stories. Our stories may not even have ghosts in them. Our stories - of the supernatural, unknown, fantastical - they may be horrible. They may make us shiver. But their primary wellspring isn’t Horror, or Fantasy.

It is Reality. Our stories are detailed, told without flourish. They tend to be personal. Not: “My father’s mother’s sister’s grandfather saw!” But: “My father – ” / “My sister – ” / “Me. I saw.” The intent being not to scare, or elicit wonder, but to communicate a lived experience. ~ As with our ghost stories, so with Universiti Malaysia Pahang’s anti-hysteria kit of salt, lime, and pepper spray; so with a film crew having a respectful doa before shooting in Broga; so with my gardener telling me that the best way to evade the estate’s flying balls of light is to duck; so with: “Hey, I’ve told you about this spirit. But can you tell me how you are using it in your story? Because you don’t want to disrespect it, you know?” ~ Where all this is coming from is I was recently trying to answer a question about my relationship to Malaysian mythology. So I thought about it and I thought about it, and I realised that I didn’t think we had one. Maybe? A mythology. That word – “mythology” – it implies distance, to me. Distance that I’m unsure our culture has. Scandinavians aren’t generally worried about the Norns fucking with them, are they? And, while Japan seems to have a continuing relationship with their spirit world, theirs strikes me as one heavily mediated by time and formalisation. ~ Dunno, I might be talking out my ass here la.

But turn the lights off and take a stroll through the oil palms, tell me that darkness isn’t now. The god down the street will help you. But he will ask a heavy price. Grandma is still in the house. She touched your shoulder, yesterday. There are bones buried under the Twin Towers, the Penang bridge. This road was paved with the corpse fat of dead teenaged girls.

THE HANTU NESAN

Close to morning, coming around the bend in the highway, you suddenly smell durian: sweet, pungent, sick. You think it is nothing. Then the traffic lines and reflectors are interrupted. Your car catches something in its headlamp lights. A stone thing – – and bare soil, rocky brown – – a second stone thing, a granite thing – – a grave, in the middle of the road. Not enough time to think, or wonder, or for the hairs to stand on your skin. You swerve. When you recover, your car is crumpled up the hillside. The engine makes a knocking noise. The windshield is missing; you feel its pieces in your face. You dare not move. You only shift your head. What you saw is still there. Two gravestones: white, cylindrical, topped with little onion domes. Six feet of earth between them, turned out of the asphalt. Still turning. The cemetery earth is moving. An end piles onto itself, into the shape of a head. It yawns. Sharp rocks are teeth in its mouth. It throws out paws, long as those on a stretching dog. It mutters, growls, and yawps. It pulls itself along the ground, with effort. It is six feet long; the headstones grow out its back. It pulls itself towards you. Later you will hear some locals call it the Hantu Nesan.

Later you will hear some locals call it the Hantu Nesan. Once it was only stone, and soil. An ordinary grave. But the body within it was a wicked man; he cheated death by way of magic. So God, angry, gave the grave life, and bade it hunt its absconded soul. They say the evil man was too clever. He turned himself into a crocodile. The Hantu Nesan could not follow. It cannot swim. It would turn to mud in river water. So it wanders. It eats other souls to survive. Sometimes it scavenges burial places. And sometimes it lies in wait. “This is why nobody drives on that highway, late at night,” the locals will say, later, towing away the debris, nervously laughing.

Too late for you. Now you are here, in the wreck of your car. You hear grumbling outside your door. You hear scratching. You are unable to move. You will die soon, you think. It drags itself into view. Its breath is sweet, pungent, sick. It makes no move to harm you, but patiently sits, panting. In its throat are worms, and wriggling things. You see a wad of white cloth, in place of a tongue, tied with white string, tied about the top of its previous meal’s head.

3 Playing With Pontianaks Recently Sharon was in Broga. It was a test shoot for a short film about a pontianak. She was production designer – she’d designed the creature’s claws; picked out the clothes it wore. It was evening. The producer insisted on having a doa before beginning. It was a practical decision: for the wellbeing of the crew; the actors, climbing in and around the trees at night. “Us having that doa could’ve been a scene from a movie!” Sharon told me. It was strange, she told me. There they were: making a film about fictional beings. At the same time: they had to make sure they were protected from real versions of those self-same beings. Sorta like making a gangster movie in a rough part of town. ~ Used to love having my fiction called surrealist, magic-realist, fantasy. I’ve always wanted to write fantasy. And “magic realism” means I was in the company of my favourite writers: Borges, Calvino. Nowadays, I’m less comfortable claiming these terms. A realistic setting, intruded on by the strange – that’s the standard definition of magic realism. And, to a non-SEA observer, a story I wrote about a bomoh hujan, “The Lordly Dragon” – published in 2016, in Fixi Novo’s “Heat: A Southeast Asian Urban Anthology” – might count as urban fantasy.

But that’s not where “The Lordly Dragon” came from. The bomoh hujans in my work are nothing novel. To treat them as such would be to other ourselves. Bomoh hujans show up in event companies’ accounts as “event consultants”. You may have stuck dried chillies and onions on a stick, yourself. That’s just the way things are, here. It’s no strange thing, invading our reality. It’s just reality.

Sharon Chin, production sketches for Amanda Nell Eu's "Lagi Senang Jaga Sekandang Lembu" (2017)

This being the case, I don’t think it’s too disingenuous for me to say that I’ve come to see what I do, conceptually, as a species of realist fiction. Or – I dunno. I’m not sure. Maybe, because of the multiplicity of the Real, here maybe it’s both? Realist and fantastical, at the same time. To describe what we do, as creators working with fantastical or speculative material, in contexts such as ours? Categories like “realist” and “fantasy” seem so inadequate, so off-the-mark. ~ What is the function of a pontianak story, in a place where things like pontianaks are considered to be a manifest part of life? Seems like a big part of it would be relief: In viewing the pontianak through genre and storytelling conventions - ie: the narrative beats of supernatural horror; scare strings; an actual film screen - we hang a curtain between it and ourselves. We make it myth. Its immediacy and danger is diminished, and we can take a breather. (I wonder whether this explains why horror-comedy is so widespread. Viewed this way, horror-comedy is basically satire of the supernatural. And, since the supernatural is real, satire of it is needful in the same way we need political satire.)

PUTERI MAS KEMBANG

You know the call of the nightjar. Everybody knows. “Auk auk auk,” it goes – in a tree, on a fence, in the dark beyond the light. “Auk auk auk.” How can you be sure it is the nightjar speaking? If you go out to look, you find it perched on a power line. It is unmistakably a bird; it is limned in moonlight, and large as two hands. Its weight sags the wire. Maybe the wire sags too much. “Auk auk auk,” it says. It falls off, upside down, dangling from a string, like a spider. It reaches the ground. Between air and earth it has changed. Its string glistens: a length of intestine, untangled. In the grass of your yard it unfolds arms instead of wings. It pulls itself up into a sitting position. You see it is a woman. She wears her hair in a neat bun; her hair stick is made of pearl and gold. She is naked otherwise. Her breasts are full, their nipples big as those of a pregnant woman. She has no legs. She is only bare entrails, bloody, below her waist.

She was a sultan’s wife, people say. She bore her husband no sons. Wicked, enraged, he cut her in two, and fed her rebellious womb to the strays in the town market. In the dark of your yard, she lifts a hand, leisurely. A canine nose appears and nuzzles her palm. The dogs have come – dachshund and mutt, wild or collared – all the dogs of your neighbourhood. Her loyal court. They stare at you, silently. You bow. You have prepared a plate full of honey jackfruit. You place this in front of her. She is a sorceress, wise in killing, shape-changing, and power. She always works against the sultan’s lineage, against his kingdom. But her schemes are inscrutable. People say she craves the taste of the jackfruit’s golden flesh. You are trying to bribe her. “For you, majesty,” you say. You wish for her favour: success in business; bad luck for your enemies; the usual things. She does not reply. She is busy chewing. Finally she spits out a seed. The dogs lick her fingers for her. With a shove she pushes herself off. Her guts snap, retract, recoil – the power line bounces. A shadow heavy and bird-shaped flies away. “Auk auk auk,” it says, somewhere in the moonlit night. How can you be sure it will help you? The dogs have retreated. The plate of jackfruit is left half-finished. You dare not touch it, in case it is cursed.

4 “Vampire, Penanggalan” The penanggalan is a monster in the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop roleplaying game. It’s true! It’s in the “Fiend Folio” – 1981, for AD&D – between the Osquip and the Pernicon: “A female vampire-type undead of fearsome power and nauseating appearance … ” Flying head, trailing intestines, jar of vinegar – the works. Seeing it there, in the book, illustrated, I felt a satisfied shiver of recognition. ~

Then I read the following, in a paragraph on the creature’s in-game abilities: “If it kills a female victim, she will rise from the grave after three days as a penanggalan.” The penanggalan popularly sucks the blood of newborns, of pregnant women. And, in Malay stories, women who die at childbirth often rise as monstrous beings. But vampirism-as-infection, as a supernatural contagion - as far as I know that’s a western thing, now an essential part of the Vladdic-Stokerite-Ricean template. ~ Games are systems, therefore necessarily methodical; no surprise that D&D and its successors fixate on matters of taxonomy. Originally written by fantasy fans, it centralises that genre’s roots in European myth.

This is why, in the Pathfinder RPG, a “Vampire” is exactly as you’d expect. Whereas the hopping ghost is named “Vampire, Jiang-shi” – meaning it is a subcategory off the normal, generic Dracul-alike. ~ Fiction from this region about this region – particularly in the English language; consciously or unconsciously – does a similar thing. Just the other day somebody asked me whether I’d categorise hantu as incorporeal beings or physical ghouls. The answer is both, or neither. Our monsters don’t scan to the usual types. Just as a jiang-shi is both zombie and vampire, or neither. But it can be a relevant query – because post-colonialism is a thing, and creators have to deal with how central the Occident is to our thoughts and imaginations. ~ Imagine a penanggalan character in a contemporary urban fantasy story. She has massive anxiety. Even in her daytime human guise she will not go into sunlight - it burns vampires, right? She’s never tried. She can’t take the risk. She is afraid of feeding. What if her condition is some sort of blood disease? What if she causes an epidemic? That’s what all the mat salleh vamps worry about … ~ Ultimately this gripe is not very different from observing that Women’s Lit and Asian Lit are subsets of Lit. Or that dragons are dragons – but eastern dragons are Eastern Dragons, italicised “long”. An issue mainly with writing in the language of our colonial masters.

Maybe can solve by a simple semiotic trick. In discussing the dragon, begin in our Southeast Asian context, and only then radiate outwards: “The dragon is a sinuous, divine being, wise but temperamental, associated with rivers. “In China, they are gods of weather. “There is a similar creature in European traditions, though there the ‘dragon’ is less a serpent and more chimerical: a cross between crocodile and lizard, with bat-like wings. It is frequently depicted as able to spit fire.”

THE HANTU PENGOPEK

She comes home sobbing. She sits on the veranda-step, turned away from you. Her shoulders are shaking. You press your cheek to the crown of her head. You ask her: “What’s wrong, my lovely?” “They threw schtones at ee,” she says. “They chased ee away.” You kiss her hair. What can you say? “I’m sorry,” you say. “Why do they haitch ee?” she asks you. Her question is wet, a strangled gasp. She twists around, desperate, reaching to hug you back. Her body turns – her head does not.

Her head is backwards on her body, now. Her neck, tight like a wrung towel, purple and bulging, almost bursting. Her face, still turned away from you. You have never seen her face. Nobody has ever seen her face. They hate her for this. They punish her for this. But this is not her fault. It is her father’s. Her father trafficked in bad teachings; in sorceries that leeched his vital fluids. When time came for him to start a family, unbeknownst to anybody, he struck bargains with jinns to restore his virility. And so she was born, half-belonging to another world. Her features must be horrible. Inhuman. Why else would they be permanently hidden? Whichever way she pivots, or is twisted – her face is turned away. “Why do they haitch ee, mummy?” “There, my lovely, there,” you say. You pull up your blouse, offer her your left breast. You avert your gaze. You feel her hands, grasping. Her mouth, latching onto your teat. A sharp, hard pain. The searing cut of serrated teeth. Her teeth are sharper, today. Your right breast is scabbed, still healing. She sucks your milk and your blood. You feel her terrible need. You long to look at her with tenderness. But if you do, she cannot feed. Your beloved daughter. Only a year old – yet growing so quickly; she nearly has a grown woman’s body, now. She is learning so fast. Today she learned how to fear and hate, from humankind. Tomorrow she will learn how to be angry.

5 Haunted House

Our house in Port Dickson is old. It looks old. The garden grows wild; the streetlight outside doesn’t work. Every time we order in, I have to coax nervous pizza boys past our neighbour’s tree branches, past where it looks like the lane has ended, into darkness, towards our house, lit by a single yellow porch-light. I suppose it looks a little spooky la. ~ When people hesitatingly ask me whether the house has any ghosts, I like to say: “Ya, got! Got Holy Ghost.” The Siew family was severely Presbyterian. When I was growing up, any idolatrous imagery was prohibited. No house-gods, no Chinese offerings. Not even those Catholic-style images of Jesus with the thorny, fiery hearts. What we did have was a great many devotional plaques, displaying verses from scripture. (It was a bit like a Muslim household, in that regard.) You can still see the hooks and stained outlines on the walls, where these frames used to hang. ~

A while back, one sunny magic-hour evening, our gardener Uncle Raman shows up at the house with a gift. For you, he tells Sharon. He holds out an egg-sized thing on a string. It is an etched metal locket: an amulet with a clear plastic front; inside, a golden – maybe brass? – figure sits, cross-legged, face in its tiny hands. For protection, Uncle Raman says. Perhaps he is concerned for Sharon’s safety? She is a young woman, living with useless boy, in a looming, dim-lit bungalow. Probably he got it in Thailand. We know he visits there often. ~

Sharon tries to rebuff Uncle Raman’s gift. She is leery of mystic things – and of course we’ve heard stories about Thai charms. Their powers, their fearful ingredients and taboos. In the locket, with that little sitting figure, there is strand of hair. Giving to you, Uncle Raman says, in his curt, uncle-y way. If you don’t want, then get rid of it. Throw it into the sea. “As if I’m going to do that!” Sharon told me.

So the amulet now hangs off a shelf in our living-room studio, with her other charms: her conference lanyards; her protest-rally ribbons; her dried-up flower garlands. ~ It occurs to me: the presence of the Thai talisman is a significant change in the genius loci of our house, compared to when I was growing up in it. Wonder how the Holy Ghost feels, sharing its home with an interloper. But, really, it has been over a year since Uncle Raman’s Weeping Bodhisattva arrived. I like to think that – above any supernatural sectarianism – spirits of acceptance watch benignly over us.

Additional Notes on Hantu

The word “hantu” is typically translated into “ghost” – but that’s not quite right; hantu aren’t always undead. “Spirit” or “monster” are slightly better. Like all Malaysian (perhaps Southeast Asian) folklore, hantu are highly variable. The Penanggalan has at least three different origins; its Sabahan “equivalent”, the Balan-balan, is actually totally different. (Can be argued that all myths start out this way, before pop culture codifies them.) Bad taxonomy should not be seen as a bug, but a feature. ~ That said, there are some themes and tropes applicable to hantu generally: ~

1. The hantu is very visceral. Its form is usually a natural human or animal shape, warped in some way. The trailing entrails of the Penanggalan, the giant tits of the Hantu Kopek, the rapey-ness of the Orang Minyak. Blood and gore and genitalia. The hantu is not prudish. ~ 2. The hantu, if gendered, is overwhelmingly gendered as female. There’s a whole bunch of psychosexual stuff that you can read into the idea that a Pontianak, when properly bound, will serve as a demure, dutiful wife. Woman as mystery and terror! The hantu is a nightmare of the patriarchy. ~ 3. The hantu is associated with mundane, natural signs – the scent of jasmine; vinegar; animals or birds. These are made uncanny by their unexpected appearance. Why is there a sudden, strong smell of jasmine in the car? How did that grasshopper get into the house? Who put these rusty nails into the stem of this banana tree? The hantu is a question, gone unanswered.

THE MALAYSIAN HANTU GENERATOR This Is The MALAYSIAN HANTU GENERATOR A lot of my current thinking about hantu are clustered around how they may be played around with. How they may be made gameable. (I play a lot of games – tabletop roleplaying games especially.) Hence this modest widget, designed to spit out unique/ variable / recognisably Malaysian-flavoured monsters. ~ Uses For The MALAYSIAN HANTU GENERATOR This example set of attributes eventually became the Bilangpinggang. All five hantu in this zine – the Bilangpinggang; Sang Paksa Penyamun Kramat; the Hantu Nesan; Puteri Mas Kembang; and the Hantu Pengopek – were conceived through the random roll of dice! The Malaysian Hantu Generator can be used as: - a decent writing prompt, if you are a writer); - an assistant for crafting new monsters, if you are a RPG game-master); - a fun way to otherwise allay the horrors of our reality.

How To Use The MALAYSIAN HANTU GENERATOR You will need six-sided dice. One is enough. Whenever the text says (d6), roll your die, and match the result with the corresponding number on the list.

Do so until you have rolled a full set of attributes, like so: [Range] 5: Intermittently across the entire state. [Animal sign] 2: A long-nosed grasshopper, poisonous green. [Smell] 6: Dug earth and rain. [Shape] 6: A bird, hunched. [Means of locomotion] 2: Hopping [in an almost comedic motion?] [Prop] 5: A funeral shroud, to keep the chill out? [Attributes] 1(6): A backwards [pair of eyes]; 2(3): A grossly distended [belly]; 6(1): The need to gather and control [corpses] [Sustenance] 1: A newborn's viscera.

You now have a randomly generated hantu!

[Range] Stories of the creature tell that it may be found (d6): 1 2 3 4 5 6

In, around a single forlorn house or shrine. Terrorising a village and the surrounding fields. Along the entire length of a river. Ranging the vast wetlands. Intermittently across the entire state. Both on this island, and the next.

[Animal sign] What animal prefigures it? The appearance (d6) of: 1 2 3 4 5 6

A punggok, hooting plaintively. A long-nosed grasshopper, poisonous green. A nightjar, sitting too-heavily on the wire. A swarm of swiftlets, in the middle of the night. A tapir. Tapirs are freaking weird. A crocodile. White, of course.

[Smell] And also the unexpected scent (d6), heavy in the air, of: 1 2 3 4 5 6

Jasmine flowers. Ripening durian. Vinegar, near. Meat, rotting. Something like kaffir lime. Dug earth and rain.

[Shape] Oh god, look. You could mistake (d6) it for: 1 A baby. 2 A shapely woman. 3 A human figure - and yet indistinct. [It is (d6): barely visible; too tall; flat, as if drawn on paper; stretched out, like rubber; the wrong colour; no, no, it shouldn't move that way!] 4 A slavering dog. 5 A tiger, softly padding. 6 A bird, hunched. [Means of locomotion] Look, look, oh god. It comes (d6): 1 2 3 4 5 6

Flying [on leathery wings?] Hopping [in an almost comedic motion?] Running [with a loping, animal gait?] Slithering [quick and snake-like?] Crawling [hovering two inches above the ground?] Sliding [through space, floating?]

[Prop] Oh god, what does it have (d6), there? Is that: 1 2 3 4 5 6

A dead infant, wrapped in a sarong? Red cloth? No, no, lots of red string. A weather-beaten gravestone? A nail? Two nails? A dozen nails? A funeral shroud, to keep the chill out? A crude child's toy? Belonging to whom?

[Attributes] You cannot run. You stare at it. It is unnatural. It has (d6, roll thrice): 1 A backwards [(d6): head; pair of hands; pair of feet; chest; set of genitals; pair of eyes] 2 A grossly distended [(d6): coil of intestines; throat; belly; pair of breasts; set of teeth; tongue] 3 An extra [(d6): tail; arm; leg; mouth; wing; eye] 4 No [(d6): body; lower torso; face; forearms; toes; lower jaw] 5 A propensity to spawn [(d6): vermin; more of itself; disease; nightmares; uncontrollable laughter; blood, out of your orifices] 6 The need to gather and control [(d6): corpses; hounds; boar; flies; centipedes; twisted vines, rooting in itself ] [Sustenance] What does it eat (d6)? Will it eat you? It doesn't need to. It needs: 1 2 3 4 5 6

A newborn's viscera. The blood of a woman, bleeding. Testicles. Yes. Honey jackfruit, orange in colour. Milk, which it sups from the teat. The souls of those recently dead.

2019