Karto's ragged breathing grew louder, breaking through the splashing of river water as his feet sank into the black mud. Behind him, torchlight burst and twisted through the thick darkness of the banana grove. The shouts of Sukamerta Village's residents drifted through the night wind, growing sharper and filling with blazing anger.
"Search until you find him! He can't have gotten far!"
"Karto! You bastard! Give this village back its peace!"
Every shout slammed into Karto's chest like a sledgehammer blow. But his fear of the mob's fury was only a tiny piece of the hell crushing his soul. In his baggy pants pocket, the black cloth pouch containing the cord that had bound Marni's burial shroud trembled slowly—a stiff pulse imitating a heartbeat, radiating heat that seemed to burn the skin of his thigh.
Karto crawled up the riverbank, dragging himself through thorny bushes that scratched his face until it bled. The bruises around his neck still radiated a burning sensation, like strands of fire constricting his airways. Marni's whisper echoed through his skull again, so clear it seemed as if the girl's disembodied mouth were right beside his ear.
Give it back... put my soul's cord back into the earth... or your neck will snap like Mbah Jambrong's...
Karto clenched his hands until his nails dug into his palms. He knew his flight would never end as long as that accursed cord remained in his possession. The shaman had died horribly, leaving Karto to bear the burden of a demonic pact whose full meaning he had never understood. There was no other way. The only way to sever this supernatural bond was to return the red cord to the place where this disaster had begun: Sukamerta Village's public cemetery, to Marni's grave, which he had desecrated by digging it up.
But to do that, he needed a hoe.
Karto swept his gaze around wildly. At the edge of the banana grove, where it bordered the villagers' fields, the storage shed for farm tools belonging to Pak Saman loomed in the darkness. Limping, his body drenched in blood and filthy earth, Karto crept toward it. The fragile wooden door was held shut only by a large stone. He slowly shifted the stone aside, careful not to make a sound.
Inside the dim shed, the smell of dry soil and manure stung his nose. His trembling hand felt along the bamboo wall until his fingers found a rough wooden handle. A hoe. The metal felt cold and sharp beneath his fingertips. The moment Karto gripped the wooden handle, the red cord in his pocket began to tremble violently, as if approving his desperate decision.
"I'll return what belongs to you, Marni..." Karto whispered, his throat dry and raw. "Forgive me... forgive my stupidity..."
He hugged the hoe tightly to his chest, then slipped back out through the gap behind the shed.
The night grew deeper as Karto crept along the deserted rice-field embankments. Fortunately, the villagers carrying torches were focused on searching the river area and the forest boundary, assuming Karto had fled the village or was hiding in Mbah Jambrong's lair. The path to the public cemetery was completely empty, wrapped in an oppressive silence.
Sukamerta Village's cemetery stood atop a small hill shaded by old frangipani trees and dense banyans. The sharp smell of rotting fallen frangipani blossoms mingled with the scent of wet earth left by the previous afternoon's rain. Karto stepped over rows of rotting wooden headstones, his eyes fixed on the far corner of the cemetery—where a mound of earth still lay in disarray from the hole he had dug the night before.
Marni's grave.
Karto knelt beside the ruined mound of red earth. The grave he had dug the previous night had been half-filled in haphazardly, leaving a dark cavity yawning open. At the bottom, in the dim moonlight veiled by mist, a white mori cloth wrapped in dirt was faintly visible.
"Marni..." Karto sobbed, his tears dripping onto the metal of the hoe in his hands.
He wasted no time. Karto drove the hoe's blade into the wet earth.
Chop! Chop! Chop!
The sound of the hoe splitting wet earth rang out across the loneliness of the cemetery. Each time the hoe rose and struck the ground, Karto's arms felt as though they were being stabbed by needles of ice. An intense cold poured from the bottom of the grave, turning Karto's breath into white vapor in the night air.
The wet red earth felt impossibly heavy, as if invisible fingers were holding back the hoe from inside the grave. The muscles in Karto's back screamed with pain, but his fear of death forced his body to keep moving without pause. Cold sweat mixed with blood and filthy soil, covering his entire chest.
After several minutes of digging in the increasingly suffocating darkness, the blade of Karto's hoe struck something soft yet solid.
Thud.
Karto stopped moving. His chest heaved rapidly. He set the hoe on the edge of the grave, then slowly peered into the hole, now deep enough to reach an adult's chest.
At the bottom of the grave, a body wrapped in a burial shroud lay stiff and unmoving. The mori cloth was no longer clean white; wet earth and blackened bloodstains had turned it brown in places. What made the hair on Karto's neck stand on end was the corpse's throat. The burial shroud around the neck had been roughly torn open, exposing the severed shroud tie—the place where Karto had taken the red cord with his sickle the night before.
With trembling hands, Karto pulled the black cloth pouch from his pants. He untied the seven-colored thread around it. The blood-red Pocong Cord slid out and landed in his palm. It felt warm and slightly sticky, as though it had been woven from veins still carrying blood.
"I'm giving it back... I'm giving this cord back..." he said, terror filling his voice.
Karto bent down and reached into the grave to place the red cord back around Marni's neck.
But before his fingers touched the burial shroud in the hole, two strands of mori cloth at the corpse's head suddenly lifted on their own.
Karto froze.
The mori cloth covering the corpse's face slowly peeled aside, dragged by an unseen supernatural force. Karto held his breath. He wanted to squeeze his eyes shut, but overwhelming fear seemed to lock his eyelids open.
The face beneath the burial shroud was fully exposed in the moon's dim glow.
Marni's face.
The girl's skin was bluish-white, with patches of decay beginning to creep across her cheeks. Her lips were blackened and tightly sealed, but both eyes were wide open—entirely white, without pupils—as they stared straight at Karto above her. Around her exposed neck, a dark bruise encircled it, exactly like the mark of fingers around Karto's neck now.
You've come back, Karto...
The voice no longer sounded inside his head. It came from the gap between Marni's corpse-stiff lips at the bottom of the earth. That gap slowly widened into a rigid, horrifying smile, exhaling the stench of a rotting corpse that seared Karto's lungs.
"Marni... please... this is your cord..." Karto threw the red cord into the hole, and it landed squarely on the corpse's chest.
But the red cord did not lie still. The instant it touched Marni's burial shroud, it melted! It turned into thick blood that quickly seeped into the corpse's mori cloth, staining the entire white shroud a blazing red!
The red liquid then erupted from the grave like a demonic spring, soaking the earth where Karto knelt.
You can't return it just by throwing it, Karto... Marni's gaping lips twitched as a voice like a mouthful of murky water poured from her throat. This cord needs blood ink from a new vessel... You have to join your blood with this wet earth...
Suddenly, dozens of intangible arms made from strands of red thread emerged from the mound of wet earth beside the hole. The spectral arms seized Karto's ankles and clothing, brutally dragging him down toward the blood-seeping grave!
"Aaargh! No! Let me go!" Karto screamed hysterically.
He twisted around and clutched the wooden handle of the hoe lying at the edge of the hole with all his strength. The hoe's metal blade sank deep into the earth above, holding Karto back from falling onto Marni's corpse, which had begun to rise from the bottom of the grave.
The blazing-red burial shroud wrapped stiffly around Marni's body. The corpse slowly lifted its head, bringing its wide-eyed, pallid face closer to Karto, who hung tautly over the mouth of the grave.
Give me your blood, Karto... or you'll be living beside my grave tonight...
In despair at the threshold of death, Karto realized the horrifying condition of this blood-inked curse: the pact could not be undone by simply returning the cord. It had to be sealed with the original blood of the one who had cut it—a blood seal to lock Marni's soul back inside the earth.
With a piercing scream that shattered the silence of the cemetery night, Karto let go of the hoe with one hand, snatched up a sharp shard of stone beside him, and without hesitation slashed open his own palm until fresh blood poured freely. He slammed his bleeding palm onto Marni's corpse's forehead below!
Karto's fresh blood struck the corpse's pallid skin like oil poured onto supernatural fire. A huge black shadow shrieked out from Marni's chest, and the red strands gripping Karto suddenly snapped all at once!