a supernatural horror novella
about the Penanggalan
by
Dr Elmi Zulkarnain Osman
As I sit alone, contemplating the past and writing the 'Penny Dreadful', which I have every reason to believe will become my notorious memoirs, I can safely say that the short time I spent attempting to solve a case in the Malaysian city of Kuching, will probably always be regarded as my most horrific. And I can pretty much say, looking back, that this particular case has never been bettered for its level of sheer, macabre grotesqueness, despite the catalogue of pure horrors I have been unfortunate enough to witness in my career.
Whilst I attempt to find closure with my demons and transition into the later years of my life and my retirement from my job as an Agent of Interpol, I can honestly say I have seen sights that would turn even the strongest of stomachs and witnessed the most despicable and depraved human behaviour. But even the most horrific of these cases fade into mere insignificance when I consider my time in south-east Malaysia in the early 1990s. I had always been a pretty level-headed detective before my deployment to Kuching but nothing anyone would have considered telling me before my departure, would possibly have prepared me for the experience I was about to have there and likewise, nothing since has been able to ease the burden or overshadow that case ever since. No amount of therapy, meditation or prescription drugs could ever erase the memory of the nights I spent in Kuching.
***
To be honest, when my superior called me into the office on that fateful morning the case finally handed to me, seemed to be nothing completely out of the ordinary. Pictures of pregnant women bleeding out onto their hospital floors, and new-born babies blooded and mutilated beside them, didn't really shock me quite as much as it should have nor may have done the average human being. I remember the hesitancy in his face as I flipped through the gore filled images and facts associated with the case I was about to be deployed upon, he quite clearly suspected something out of the ordinary right from the beginning but I just predicted it to be the handiwork of some deranged serial killer, perhaps an awful obstetrician with a particularly sadistic nature or failing that a series of horrible, fatal mistakes that had been carried out by a mis-practising medics.
And despite my boss's apparent concern and worry over this case, it didn't seem to be too out of the ordinary to my mind after I had previously tracked heinous serial killers and despicable cults across the globe for many years before then. And although you could perhaps argue that if this case was to prove to be a straightforward as I had naïvely assumed it would, then maybe the local police force could have dealt with it easily enough themselves, although in the back of my mind I was aware that South Malaysia was not renowned for its effective policing and so was not entirely surprised that Interpol had been asked to look into the case.
Still to this day, I remember flicking through the confidential files about a series of horrible killings occurring in the maternity wards of Kuching's biggest hospital during my flight over. Allegedly around 12 new mothers, six new-born babies and two expectant mothers, had been horribly murdered in a period of around seven months, each seemingly having their blood drained from their body. This was quite possibly, and probably to many people's minds, a most horrific series of killings, but until I arrived in Kuching, to my mind, it by far wasn't going to be the worst thing I'd ever experienced as the case I'd immediately been involved in before going to Malaysia, had seen me track a sadistic religious cult across South America. I was definitely anticipating a slightly easier case this time round.
And in all honesty, who wouldn't think this. Sure, it was destined to be an unpleasant and upsetting case to deal with, but I had been trained for many years to do this sort of work without suffering too much psychological damage. To my egotistical but logical mind, it plainly seemed a safe bet that Kuching General Infirmary was being plagued by either incompetent members of staff or a serial killing medic, and so I was prepared to look into the training statuses of all of the maternity units staff before commencing potential legal proceedings and ensuring the victims of what I thought might be a series of mistakes were well supported and compensated. Or on the other hand I was happy to conduct a manhunt and deduce which member of the medical team was also hellbent on a killing spree before handing them over to the authorities. I didn't anticipate the case being too difficult to crack, and in honesty, not to out of the ordinary for its setting. How wrong my hypothesis was to turn out?
***
In some ways it was fairly convenient that another murder was committed within hours of me landing in Kuching. I'd barely managed to acclimatise to the subtropical climate and had only booked in to my hotel room about an hour before I was called in by the local chief police, Chief Eka Zulkarnain. I remember feeling quite irritated by the fact at the time. Here I was, a travelling Interpol Agent about to embark on what I'd considered a quick and easy case, albeit hideous and grotesque, I'd barely landed on a new continent and was feeling very jetlagged and in need of a good few hours' sleep, a shower and a hearty meal before I started work. But alas, I'd barely had a cup of coffee on Malaysian soil when I was already being called out to deal with the case that I'd assumed the local police could have dealt with themselves had they not been quite so inept.
Regardless I freshened up and treated myself to a fresh outfit before heading go to the local maternity ward where an expectant mother had been murdered in her bed just days before she was expected to give birth. Chief Eka Zulkarnain met me at the entrance to the maternity ward about an hour after he had called me in to assist and greeted me with one of the sweatiest handshakes I'd ever experienced. I remember being surprised by just how clammy his right palm had been when he'd eagerly greeted me at the door to the side ward that had very suddenly become a horrific crime scene. I remember thinking how strange it was that he was so sweaty and eager to lead me into what had become yet another fatal incident within the hospital. He was a small, slender and pasty kind of man and looked as if he carried the worries of the upon his shoulders. As he shook my hand rapidly, it was almost as if he was feeling a little relieved, handing the relay baton onto a more able competitor.
"The corpse is this way," he informed me in broken English, leading me into the side ward that housed the latest victim, "this lady died before her child was born, but they saved her baby."
The thing I recall more than anything, on entering that room was the stench of stale blood. Now don't get me wrong, most murder scenes do smell of death, decay and usually blood, but on this occasion that horrible, metallic odour seemed to be much more prominent than many of the murder scenes I'd been in previously. Usually there is just the expected level of gore in a crime scene, and is often spread over a wider area, however in this macabre setting, it seemed almost as if the maximum amount of blood had been removed from the corpse and instead of the splatter patterns one would usually find, it seemed as if much of the wasted bodily fluids were concentrated into one area.
It was fairly difficult at first to understand exactly what happened within that room. It wasn't really until Chief Eka explained to me in as much detail as he possible could, what had happened, that I even attempted to understand the carnage in front of me. The victim was a Kuching local, a pretty young girl from the rural areas surrounding the city, who was in her mid-20s and expecting her first child. Her corpse was laid out on her bed, in the centre of the room, her torso still split open from the emergency caesarean section she'd received after death in order to save her unborn baby. Her body lay amongst two fairly distinct pools of blood, one clearly being the spillage from her baby's rescue, but another, which was much drier and caked into the bed sheets and resided beneath the lower half of the body.
Apparently, the way the story went, according to staff interviews that had been conducted by Chief Eka and his team, was that that the staff on duty had been alerted to the girl's apparent distress by several loud shrieks coming from the room, followed by the alarm of the cardiac monitor she was attached to bleeping loudly into life. But as they had attempted to gain access to the room, they had been thwarted as the heavy fire door had been locked from the inside. In the time it taken staff to break through the door, the young woman had gone into cardiac arrest and on entry her ECG had well and truly flatlined. It had then been a rush to attempt to deliver the baby as quickly as possible, as this was often the priority in cases of perinatal arrest, and it had been quickly judged that the mother was likely beyond saving regardless. Thankfully, the baby had survived the trauma and was at that point, being nursed to health in the hospital's special care unit.
One of the strangest things about the crime scene, had perhaps been that the young woman was clearly holding a pair of scissors in her hand, and that a number of the maternity ward staff had speculated that she had locked herself inside the side ward in an attempt to give herself an abortion, but had failed miserably in this task. Given the evidence at face value, it would be fairly easy to deduce this, however, Chief Eka's non-verbal signals, quickly gave away the fact that he didn't believe this to be the case. When I took a closer look at the cadaver, it was clear that the scissors had been nowhere near her internal organs, as they were as clean as the day they were sterilised and packaged and besides, there was no blood trail which would even have helped to support the theory that she had used the scissors and then walked across the room to give them a clean.
And it was her facial expression that detracted from the theories of the hospital workers in my mind. Her eyes were wide with fear and her face had been contorted into an expression of pure fear, the head was arched back on her neck and her upper spine seemed tense and bent into an unnatural avoidance of pain. This wasn't by any means the first disturbed and distraught corpse I had ever come across, but there was something about the look upon the girl's face, that made me first suspect that something wasn't quite normal with this case, and at very least she didn't look like she'd committed a premeditated abortion on herself. She almost looked as if she had been visited by Satan himself.
This quickly led me to disregard my malpractice theory and instead believe that this had been the work of a particularly sadistic and cruel serial killer. My hypothesis regarding a crazed medic now seemed much more likely over the idea of a serious of botched procedures, however the staff on duty maintained that nobody had been in the room with when the door had been locked, and nobody had exited as they had attempted to rescue her baby.
"This is how they have all been killed," muttered Chief Eka as he led me away from the crime scene, "you must get to the bottom of this, these are not natural forces at work. It is the evil of the devil."
"I'm not a priest or an exorcist," I remember chuckling when he said this to me, "I am just a standard, International detective and I have no reason to believe that I would be enlisted into any sort of a ghost hunt I am afraid."
To which I remember him uttering the word 'Penanggalan' to me for the first time, before patting me on the shoulder and leaving.
Thankfully the next few days were a fairly quiet affair, there was no more killing to be heard off and whilst we waited the autopsy results from the latest victim, I was able to complete a stringent case review of the previous deaths, as well as researching this strange, colloquial term the Chief had introduced me to. The case notes and the evidence compiled by the police in Kuching where a regular collection of horrors, similar to the actual recordings of evidence I had witnessed a number of times when being deployed on difficult cases, although in truth, the killer had amassed quite a darkly impressive body count in a reasonably short time. Whoever was carrying out these killings, had a real thirst and hunger for death.
In all truth, in those early days in Kuching, I didn't really have much of a link to go on. There was no common denominator, no identical staff member on duty with each killing and no rhyme or reason into how the victims had been selected, except that they were either new-born babies or expectant mothers. On number of occasions there had been strange little quirks to be recognised, such as one victim of the killer was reviled to have had a number of pineapples stored under her bed, and a few of the victims notably held scissors in their hands at the time of their death, or had stored scissors beneath their pillows or mattresses, and just like in the case of the most recent victim, each time the scissors were seemingly perfectly clean.
And that lack of a link between the murders, or a logical lead to follow prompted me to do a little research into the term that Chief Eka had muttered to me on my departure from the crime scene this. Not really knowing what I'd discover, I casually asked a friend back at head office to research me the Malaysian term 'Penanggalan' and send me as much information as they possibly could on the theme. I didn't really know what I was hoping to discover, I wasn't really sure what the Chief was hinting when he had mentioned that term to me and at worst I assumed he was attempting to tip me off about some religious ritual or even a term used by gangs, either way I didn't expect it to be quite what it was when I suddenly received an neatly wrapped package of old Malaysian books which my contacts back at base had arranged with the local library to supply me with.
When I first skipped to the page in the book that featured the word 'Penanggalan', I almost laughed out loud. Here I was, one of the best Interpol agents in the world, renowned for cracking some of modern histories most gut-wrenching cases, having Kuching's head of police attempt to convince me that the collection of hideous murders I was investigating, were being carried out by a floating head! The term 'Penanggalan' had seemingly been used in Malaysia for many years and although meaning literally 'detached', had been used to describe a creature of folklore and myth, renowned for its murderous capabilities and its hunger for flesh. Sure, some versions of the story suggested that the true form of 'Penanggalan' were often cursed midwives, which would have made sense, but other tales seemed to depict ancient priestesses who had been caused to detach their own heads from the body in shock.
The images that met my eyes throughout the book of heads floating around, still attached to their entrails and vital organs, put me in mind of a serial killer I had once caught in Russia, and didn't in my mind, represent what such a hideous killer could actually look like, to start with, the heads I'd seen still attached to entrails and bodily organs back in Russia, were extremely dead. To my mind this case now reeked of a sadistic killer whose most foolish of alibis, was to try and suggest that some mythical, vampiric creature was running around Kuching can people, probably just to cover their own devilish tracks.
There were a number of similarities in these killings to those of the urban legends and myths I was reading about the Penanggalan, in that it sucked the blood of its victims, enjoyed the taste of fresh young blood as well as the blood of mothers, and that it could frequently enter rooms, undetected, but no part of my logical brain, would allow me to believe that I was here, in Kuching to hunt down and stop the flying head of a woman who had been cursed by the devil and worked as a caring midwife by day. The case was quickly becoming twisted version of Scooby Doo episode and I was quickly becoming convinced that there was particular sadist, or group of sadists working within the hospital, that could be killing for fun and using an age-old myth to cover it up. I would simply have to discover the killers and unmask them before further damage could be done.
***
It wasn't actually too long at all, until my services were once again called upon. After I had spent a couple of days researching the case, building up potential leads and of course reading fictional Malaysian ghost stories, I was called into the hospital to be with the Chief and a patient who was swearing blind that she had been visited by a Penanggalan the night before, and had only been spared, as she had gone into labour and her husband and several medics had attended the birth of her child. It was a pretty ordinary night in Kuching, the atmosphere was moist and warm, and the air was damp as we'd experienced a couple of brief tropical downpours during the day. The Chief led me back to the maternity ward and into another side room, situated at the very back of the unit. The woman in question was introduced to me simply as Nor, A 27-year-old local girl, who was expecting her second child, but first born in a hospital setting.
Both mother and baby were seemingly doing fairly well and would be nursed by a pretty young midwife by the name of the Nabeela, who informed me in broken English, that patients were faring well. Apparently, throughout the day Nor had been acting irrationally and anxiously, adamant that she had been visited by a demonic presence the night before and was fully expecting it to return that night to feast upon either herself or a new-born baby girl. She had proved so anxious throughout the day that Nabeela and her colleagues had eventually decided to provide Nor with a mild sedative to help her to relax and enjoy a calm night's sleep. But due to the nature of her claims, and the fact that earlier in the day, the maternity wards pathology refrigerator had been emptied of numerous stored placentas, the Chief had decided it was probably sensible to stay guard with the patient and had obviously requested my assistance.
On other occasions, I may have refused the Chief's invitation, deeming it slightly ridiculous and a bit of a waste of my time, but as he seemed quite adamant about this case and as I had very little else to do, I accepted his invitation and prepared to spend my evening in company of a new-born baby, a sedated Malaysian mother, an attractive young midwife and a slightly crazy Chief of Police. And things when generally as I'd expected, right up until about 4 o'clock in the morning, when we were all awoken from our slumber by the, bloodcurdling, shrill, shrieks of Nor who had seemingly been suddenly awoken from her deep, drug induced sleep.
Without any sort of prior warning, the large bulky crash trolley that had been sat in the corner of the room, suddenly gained its own life and was hurled over towards the door, blocking anyone's exit or entrance and every light in the room and immediately outside on the corridor flickered out and plunged us into complete darkness.
"What the hell is going on", I screamed hurriedly, attempting to lift myself up from the floor where I had fallen after being startled by Nor's screams, "what is she saying, Chief?"
"She is saying, SHE is here," replied the Chief loudly with a definite anxiety in his voice, as he bumbled around in an attempt to handle the situation.
Within what could actually only have been a matter of seconds, as I struggled in the dark to find my gun and my pocket flashlight, the room was filled with noise, the screams of both Nor and Nabeela filled our ears and the Chief yelled for me to protect Nor and he would the baby. As I scrambled over to where I thought that Nor's bed was, I could hear Nor beginning to chant what I assumed to be some form of prayer and the sickening sound of breaking bones filled my ears as I blindly reached out to find out where she was, the scent of fresh blood, drowning my nostrils. Suddenly I stood in what I can only assume to be a pool of blood and found myself slipping onto the floor, banging my head on the side of the bed as I did so.
As I attempted to regain my faculties, I discovered a trickle of fresh blood running down my forehead and could only listen, dazed as Nor's pleads and prayers ceased abruptly after hearing yet another bone snap, but this time one that seemed much louder and final than the previous possible fractures. In the background I could hear Nabeela continuing to scramble away at the upturned crash trolley blocking the door, in an attempt to escape, the baby was by now beginning to cry and scream, terrified by the pandemonium and the Chief had also started to mutter anxious mantras.
The next thing I can really remember was that somebody from the outside had finally managed to break into the room and switch some lights on, as they did, both Nabeela and the Chief omitted loud shrieks of discomfort and I was swiftly helped to my feet by a couple of orderlies. The warm streak of blood that was trickling from a gash in my head faded into insignificance as the sight that greeted my eyes when they finally regained some sort of focus, was one of true horror. The room was completely smashed up, almost unbelievably so, for what could only have been an attack lasting around thirty seconds to a minute. Nabeela sat hunched up in one corner, blood covering her uniform with a gash evident on her forearm and the Chief lay curled up on the floor by the baby's crib, clutching the backs of his legs, although he had evidently succeeded in his mission to protect the baby.
However, it seemed that I had not been quite successful as the Chief as Nor lay in huge piles of her own blood and gore, her limbs and spine, contorted and folded into the most unimaginably unnatural positions, her face illustrating the total fear she must have been feeling in her last moments. Those who required medical treatment were administered it and as many members of the police force that could be enlisted to the crime scene, were so.
After I'd cleaned myself up and had taken as many notes as needed, I made my way down to the accident and emergency department to visit the Chief. The journey down to the emergency room was one filled with thoughtfulness and confusion. What had actually gone on in that room? Had somebody managed to break in whilst we had all been doing? Were one of the two people in the same room as me the actual killer? Had Nor been given an actual sedative or had she been poisoned with a drug that had created such violent seizures? Or was I actually going to admit the what had happened in that room tonight, was actually beginning to reek of the supernatural?
When I arrived by where the Chief was being nursed, the extent to which he appeared unwell shocked me to the core. I had to assumed that he'd merely received an injury amongst the chaos that had ensued in that little side room, maybe a minor head or a laceration that had been caused in the commotion, in the Chief's efforts to save both Nor and her new-born, but in actual fact he was in a much worse state than that. He looked extremely unwell. He had large, red, open sores, cast in lines across the backs of his legs, the edges beginning to blister already, set out in a line as if he had had been whipped from behind with a live electrical cable.
"What the Hell happened to you?" I muttered in astonishment after gazing upon his legs for the first time.
"She got me," he moaned, clearly suffering the painful effects of this horrendous injury, "the Penanggalan got me, she tried to get the baby, but I stopped her, her tentacles got me."
Just in the same way as I did the very first time the Chief mentioned the Penanggalan to me, every inch of my body wanted to disregard the unbelievable notion, but after seeing what I had in Kuching so far, and after gazing at the Chiefs undeniably, unbelievable injuries, I had to admit that I was starting to believe that something sinister and less than human was present.
"And they did that to you?" I asked,
"Yes, her touch, can injure for a long time. Medicine cannot help these wounds."
From that moment, I knew I had to believe in what the Chief was telling me, no matter how irrational it all seemed, and no matter how much my training (and experience) had convinced and taught me that, us, as human beings were the evillest creatures in existence. I had to accept that this was actually going to be something different, something paranormal, something other worldly, something extremely dangerous and black to the very pit of its soul.
"What do I need to do to help you, Chief?" I asked, embracing the belief, "and how will I stop this thing killing again?"
"You need to speak to Sulong," the Chief groaned, handing me a scrunched-up piece of paper with an address scrawled on it, "he is our best Bomoh, you Europeans may refer to him as a Shaman. Only he can heel my sores and whilst I am ill, he can help you trap Penanggalan."
I nodded in acknowledgement and took the piece of paper from his hand, it was time I opened my mind to the possibility of the impossible in this case, "I will visit him tomorrow first thing and enlist his help. We will do whatever we need to until this stops, but you must concentrate on your health".
***
As I left the emergency department, I was suddenly approached by an older, Malaysian Lady, dressed in a uniform similar to that which Nabeela had worn earlier that night, just in a darker colour. I was slightly startled as she jumped out of the shadows and gripped my arm tightly. Her composure was none existent, and her face ached with aging and anxiety, a strong scent of Chlorhexidine hung heavy in the cold night air.
"Shit," I muttered shuddering, "who are you?"
"I am Sulastri Binti Khamis," whispered the woman, nervously looking to the floor and forcing her words out as quickly as possible, whilst digging her nails deep into my skin, "I work on the maternity unit and I fear I employed a monster when I hired Nabeela."
"What do you mean?" I asked,
"The Penanggalan, I think Nabeela is the Penanggalan."
***
The address the Chief had given me had been reasonably easy to find the next morning and had taken me on an interesting journey through one of Kuching's more traditional areas. When I arrived at Sulong's shop, it was totally as I expected and resembled something directly from a 1980's, straight to video, fantasy movie, with shelves stacked from ceiling to floor with various jars and bottles of curiosities and a small desk sat in the corner where a slender, weak looking, yet strangely intimidating old man sat.
Sulong himself was a peculiar little man. He was of Malaysian descent and must have been somewhere in his early 60s in my estimation, either that or his slender, almost scrawny body and tightly screwed up face, betrayed him terribly. As I made my introductions and explained I was in Kuching working on a case for Interpol, his face remained motionless and emotionless and it wasn't until I mentioned the Chiefs name and the term 'Penanggalan', that he even raised his eyes from the newspaper he had been reading.
"He said you'd come eventually." He muttered under his breath,
"So can you help me?"
"Yes," he nodded calmly, "we must go to heal the Chief first, but then we will need to catch this Demon."
As we made the journey back into Kuching's modern area, the old Bomoh discussed his knowledge of the Penanggalan in vast detail with me. Apparently, this would not be the first time he had encountered this mythical, almost vampiric creature. He told me that he'd experienced this problem, within an independent, rural village, set very far away from any of Malaysia's major cities, just before the outbreak of the First World War. He told me that at the time, he was quite an inexperienced Bomoh and a fairly young man to boot, and when I chuckled at this claim, he harshly informed me that he was only in his mid-30s at the time. I smiled to myself as I quickly did the maths and realised that for Sulong to be of that age at that time, he must have been well into his hundreds right now. I grinned as I assumed that he'd exaggerated his age but soon came to the thinking that if there really was a Demon head flying around Kuching's biggest hospital, was it really so far-fetched that this wise old man could be the age he was suggesting?
Sulong explained how confused he had been when he had first encountered this problem, and that it taken him quite some time to isolate and destroy the Penanggalan that was terrorising the particular village he had been called to. Allegedly, or so the story had gone, the villages High Priestess had been turned into a Penanggalan whilst bathing and meditating at the same time. A young farmer had accidentally walked in on her in her very private and naked state, causing her such a shock that her head had actually detached from her naked body in panic. As had blamed the farmer for turning her into a monster by walking in, she flew at him in a rage, dragging her entrails and vital organs with her.
Of course, the farmer had not managed to survive the occurrence, quickly finding himself brutally bitten to death by the monstrous version of the priestess, just before the sun arose when she had returned to her body to live out the day as normal. But on the second day, after the body of the farmer had been found and the priestess had subconsciously removed herself from her body the following night and had unwittingly allowed her demonic alter ego to again go on a rampage in the village, killing and partially devouring three of the village's youngest children, Sulong had been summoned.
He told me that it had taken him three days to eventually capture the high priestess in her Penanggalan state. He had learnt much about the creature in those days and had learnt much more in later life as he had strived to research more on the topic. Sulong told me of how he had eventually managed to trap the high priestess and catch her while she was in her Penanggalan form by surrounding her lifeless body with pineapples, upon which her entrails had caught as she tried to re-enter. And from then on, Sulong explained grimly, it was a matter of simply setting her and her body alight and using a basic spell to cast her soul into hell.
He was not surprised that the chief had sustained such injuries in the attack the night before and clarified for me that, should human skin come into contact with the dangling entrails of the Penanggalan, then the human would become extremely unwell and the horrific wounds caused by the slightest of touches, would be devilishly difficult to heal and often prove fatal, without magic being involved. And so, as Sulong attended the Chief's bedside, to try and help him heal from his supernatural injuries, I paid a visit to my mysterious informant Sulastri Binti Khamis to inform her of the plan that we intended to carry out that very evening in order to discover who was our Penanggalan, with Nabeela being our chief suspect.
***
I must admit, that before myself and Sulong carried out our plan to trap our supernatural killer, there had been some doubts in my mind about the ethics of what we were about to do and about how I assumed the Shaman would have to deal with the creature once we had trapped her. He had joined me discussing a plan with Sulastri, (who we by then knew to be the manager of the maternity unit) and agreed that all the information she had provided us with, was actually in fitting with the years of study he had undertaken. But still, on the night of our attempts to catch the Penanggalan, I had sickening, uneasy feeling about what we were about to do.
Sulastri had used her power and influence, to alter the rosters for the night and 'due to the stressful and horrific circumstances' some of her staff had been working under in recent nights, had arranged a relaxing evening in a hotel for a number of the nurses and midwives whom had been directly affected by the killings, to have a night off and enjoy a period of recuperation. This number, of course included Nabeela, who due to her presence in many of the killings and the suspicions of Sulastri was fast becoming our number one suspect. Five girls in total given the night off and treated to relaxing foot massages and glasses of champagne, laced with mild sedatives to ensure a good night sleep. As legend had it, a panicked Penanggalan could be foolish enough to reattach its head to its body, completely back to front if pushed to do so in a hurry, and this theory provided the basis of Sulong's plan.
As the members of staff in question were taken off to the spa by Sulastri and wined, dined and pampered, me and Sulong, hurriedly evacuated the maternity ward and waited for any sign of an evil visitation. The plan was for Sulastri to remain with the girls, ensure they were all tucked up in bed and then to turn their bodies into the opposite position to which they had fallen asleep, before locking them inside their shared sleeping quarters, she had hired in the spa. Nobody would be able to gain access or leave the room, she would stand guard and Sulong and I would remain on the maternity ward until we noticed any signs of an attempted Penanggalan attack. Once we had a hint that she was present and searching for the pregnant or new-born meals which she desired, we would attempt to scare her away, hopefully forcing the Penanggalan to rush back to her body.
It had not taken us and a number of hospital orderlies too long at all to evacuate the maternity ward and have the patients and those women we felt were in danger of giving birth, taken to a secure private hospital, and as we sat in the darkness, with only touches to give us light, Sulong prepared me mentally for how we would have to fight the Penanggalan with basic machetes to ensure any sort of damage. The chances of us hitting the creature with any kind of gunshot and inflicting any damage at all held very low percentage of success and in fact, many Penanggalan sightings had suggested that bullets seemed to pass through the floating face, if indeed it wasn't masked with a form of invisibility which made it impossible to target in the first place. Indeed, from the stories he told me, our best chance to upset our potentially deadly visitor, was to swing our machetes and hope to catch one of her trailing entrails or organs with our blades.
We had barely a chance to formulate a plan correctly, before we suddenly heard a crashing and banging from one of the side rooms. I felt my heart jump into my throat and my respirations suddenly quicken as I accepted that myself and a man who claimed to be over a hundred years old, were about to attempt to fight this demonic creature with the ability to eat humans, injure them horrifically with just the slightest touch and quite possibly turn invisible. There was no way that the banging in the room just down the corridor from where we sat could have been caused by anything other than a hungry Penanggalan as we had totally emptied the ward of people and then had sat purposely by the only entrance to the unit, so we could be certain that nothing human or with a physical shape could have entered. Unfortunately for us, it was likely that the Penanggalan was with us, because as Sulong had just decided to inform me, they often had the ability to pass through walls, floor boards and easily travelled through ventilation or heating systems.
Taking a deep breath, I turned towards Sulong as I raised from my seat and with a calm and reassured nod, back he also stood, before we made our way silently, side-by-side into the side room where we had heard the noise coming from. As we entered, we used our flashlights to scan every corner of the room, but without immediately picking up on any sign of life up. Although despite this, we knew there was another presence in the room as the air hung heavy with the scent of blood and death mixed in with surgical spirits. Calmly we continued to shine our flashlights all around the room, hoping to catch the slightest sign of the monster we knew was trapped inside the room with us. I felt my armpits quickly dampening as my heart raced irrationally and my knuckles became white as a grasped the machete that would provide my only protection.
It was almost as if the Penanggalan knew she had been tricked. Although there was a definite feeling of doom in the air, either the Penanggalan was trying to lure us into a deadly trap or it was actually hatching a plan in order to escape as it knew there was no food here for it tonight. After what was probably only about a minute, but actually seemed like it was at least ten, torrid, terror filled minutes of randomly hoping to catch something in our flashlight beams, I suddenly heard what sounded like the weeping of a woman coming from beneath the empty bed in the centre of the room. Cautiously I flashed my flashlight over towards where Sulong was stood, nodded and then pointed the beam of the torch towards the bottom of the bed to indicate that, that was where I thought that the Penanggalan was hiding. Sulong nodded in reply and we both crept forward, flashlights and machetes at the ready, in order to have a close look.
I'd barely shone my light upon what appeared as the back of the head, covered in long dark hair, that glowed almost ethereally, when it noticed our presence, omitted an ear-piercing shriek and threw the bed beneath which it hid, hard across the room. Both myself and Sulong fell backwards in shock and as I felt a presence disturbing the air next to me, I struck out wildly with my machete until I could only, assume that I had met with flesh as another high-pitched shriek, this time longer and louder, filled our ears and stream of thick blood suddenly appeared on my weapons edge. Eventually the shriek, without ever stopping, seemed to disappear into the distance and after a few moments both myself and Sulong were able to steady ourselves and make our way to the car I had waiting for us in the hospital's main entrance.
"That was her wasn't it," I said to Sulong breathlessly as we jogged down the hospital's long corridors (and incidentally, he could sure jog for such an old man),
"It was." He replied calmly, "and you managed to upset her."
"Do you think she will have gone back to the spa, Sulong?"
"We shall soon find out." He replied, "But when we do discover the Penanggalan amongst those women, you must accept the evidence and allow me to take action. No form of legislation will cease this creature's killing and no prison can hold it. You must remember that in the coming hours."
***
We played out the rest of the journey, albeit being in a dash at breakneck speed across the city, in absolute silence. I could almost anticipate how this case was going to ultimately be solved and had to admit how little power I actually held in the situation, despite it being my investigation. When we arrived back at the spa, we were quickly able to locate Sulastri whom was sat, supping strong coffee, outside the room in which she had locked her five staff members.
"She came, didn't she?" She whispered and lowered her head in shame and horror when Sulong calmly nodded his reply to.
Almost with a little bit of remorse, Sulastri put down her cup of coffee and unlocked the door, allowing myself and Sulong entrance to the room where four innocent young girls slept and one murderous Penanggalan hid. One by one, with me shining my torchlight upon the beds, Sulong inspected each of the girls in turn, until finally, as he pulled back the duvet on the fourth bed, it was evident to us that the young girl was laying asleep on her tummy, yet her head clearly faced forward and was fused to her body in this unnatural and grossly upsetting amalgamation of a sleeping body and an anxious Penanggalan. To make matters worse, it appeared that Sulastri had been absolutely correct in her deductions, as the face that was attached erroneously to its body, although feigning a deep sleep, was undeniably that of Nabeela's.
Calmly Sulong removed the machete from the holster he had carried it to the spa in, placed his hand on my hand which held my flashlight, indicating that he needed me to hold still and give him some light, as well as to reassure me that he would take things from here, before he calmly stepped over to Nabeela's ill-fitting jigsaw of the body and rammed his machete deep into the flesh of her thigh before pulling it immediately back out with a sickening plop.
Almost immediately the Penanggalan / Nabeela hybrid screeched out in pain and lurched its body into position seated upright and then there, for everyone's eyes to see, Nabeela's head twisted around and around until the skin became taught and ripped itself away from her shoulders. Her contorted, almost luminous face, screeched as the head that housed it slowly pulled itself away from the redundant body, raising menacingly into the air and pulling gory entrails, blooded ligaments and torn muscles away with it as Nabeela's body flopped back onto the bed. I held my breath slightly as the evil, possessed face stared menacingly back at us, as if it was ready to devour us as well. But suddenly, with reactions not befitting of a man in his 100's, regardless of how powerful a Shaman he was supposed to be, Sulong launched his machete at the Penanggalan, which entered its lungs as they were being pulled from the body and flung the creature backwards until it was pinned to the wall behind it with his knife.
As the creature wriggled and screeched and attempted to pull itself away from the wall it had been pinned to like a cheap poster, Sulong turned to me and smiled,
"You must now leave," he began, "this is my responsibility now and what comes will not be pleasant to the eye of a normal person. You must evacuate the spa as quickly as possible and not look back at what you have left behind."
As myself and Sulastri awoke the sleepy girls and led them to the exit of the spa, I could hear Sulong chanting all manner of incantations and mantras, for what I assumed would be some form of exorcism but as I left that room for the last time and switched on the spa's fire alarm, I could already hear small pockets of fire and flame breaking out between the shrieks of both the Penanggalan and Sulong.
***
I only needed to remain in Kuching for a few days after the incident. A horrific fire had gone on to engulf the spa, and it had been burned down to its very foundations. No bodies or human remains were recovered from the rubble and ashes where the spa had once stood and nothing was heard from Nabeela or Sulong immediately afterwards and when I visited his shop before leaving Kuching, it remained very, very closed. The Chief had already begun to make a full recovery and thanked me for my faith in his theory as i dropped by the hospital before leaving. He told me in the nights and days following the incident, there had not even been one murder in the city, Penanggalan related or not and in fact the worst crime that had been conducted was an arson attack on a meat processing factory, which had already been accounted to a particularly volatile and militant animal rights group based in Kuching.
Seemingly ashamed by what had happened on her ward, Sulastri had quickly resigned from her post as the maternity unit's manager and had attempted to move quietly into a more rural area of Kuching, away from prying eyes, conspiracy theorists and nosing media. And who could blame, even I felt a certain degree of remorse over this case and to an extent felt the burden of an avoidable death, as even though I knew that Nabeela had to die for the greater good, part of me felt disappointed that I had allowed her to devour Nor, whilst I was actually in the room with her. Officially, we had identified Nabeela as a heartless, twisted, serial killing midwife who had eventually lost her own life, whilst attempting to kill many more on a night out with her colleagues in the spa.
And that's where you think this story would naturally end. That's where I'd actually prefer the story to end, but unfortunately, I can't offer you the happy ending most of us would desire and the relief that even though we know something horrific and satanic had happened, we are lured into a false sense of security as we feel justice has been done. No, unfortunately this torrid tale has one final, horrific twist.
Two months after my brief period in Kuching, much to my surprise I received a package in the mail that had been sent to me by Chief Eka Zulkarnain as he had been wrapping up evidence from the case. As I opened the package and read through the file inside which contained a number of photographs that had been taken of the Kuching Penanggalan in action, my heart sunk right into my soul. All of these pictures had been taken previous to my deployment in Kuching, so were not depicting new cases or murders, but had been found after we had concluded our investigation. It wasn't the fact that these new photographs depicted horrific scenes of murdered, semi-devoured corpses nor was it the fact that a horrific, monstrous floating Demon head was there in clear sight for all to see, that broke my soul. It was the fact that these photos had been taken on Nabeela's mobile phone.
Also, in the pack that the chief had sent me was a letter, written in the Nabeela's hand, make of it what you will, which read the following:
To whomever may find this letter, I need to say that I am deeply upset about what happened to me and I can only guess that if you are reading this letter now, I have already met my unfortunate end. Sulastri has been after me ever since I discovered that she was the cause of many of the deaths on our ward, because she is a Penanggalan by night and covers the truth up fairly well during the day when she is at work, although, if you look closely you can often see her lick her lips when she attends to the birth of a new child.
As soon as the killings started to happen, I knew it was the work of a Penanggalan, my grandmother had told me the stories of these creatures many times as a child and it perhaps even influenced my decision to become a midwife. I knew quite early on in the killing spree, that it was the work of what many people would consider a myth, but I even managed to photograph the monster during hits third murder.
It did take me a while to find out that it was Sulastri who was committing the murders, but after accounting for everybody else in our team one night, I managed to deduce it was her. After breaking in to her office, I managed to find proof in her journal that she was the Penanggalan as her journal was full of incantations and chants that suggested she was in league with the devil himself. My grandma had often told me how many authoritative women looked to the devil, to give them powers and influence but could often be turned to Penanggalan after breaking their promises to him.
If you are reading this letter you likely already also know, that I too am a cursed Penanggalan and so if I am already dead, I hope my sacrifice has brought the Sulastri to justice. I did not become a Penanggalan through choice, I certainly did not make any pact with the devil and I have tried my hardest not to kill by desperately trying to quench my thirst for blood by eating corpses within the hospital and the many discarded placentas we have in the labs. I am unsure if I have killed whilst in demonic state and am deeply sorry if I have.
It was Sulastri Khamis that turned me into a Penanggalan. She visited me one night on an ethereal plane, interrupting me as I meditated. She must be very powerful as she was able to remove my head from my shoulders and share with me her curse whilst I was imprisoned in my own mind. I was confused at first as to why she did this, it was clear she knew that I'd discovered her secret, but I expected her to either fire me from my job or possibly even feast upon my flesh until I died. Now I understand that I am likely to become a scapegoat and if this letter has been found, then her plan has probably succeeded.
I regret deeply that I didn't feel the confidence to report these findings to the authorities before the matron could catch up with me, it was my duty of candour to report her unnatural actions, but I felt that until I had sufficient evidence, nobody in the police would believe a naive young midwife, with a seemingly silly story. I feel the weight on my soul of any deaths that have been caused by my actions and hope that suffering this curse will help to stop a real and deadly evil and improve my karma in the next life.
*** The End ***