Chapter 8: The Nameless Grave
A piercing scream erupted from Marni's corpse, shattering the night as it soared high through the dense leaves of the ancient banyan tree. It was not a human voice; it was the roar of thousands of unseen threads being forcibly severed when Karto's fresh blood soaked her forehead. The red light enveloping the mori cloth suddenly receded, shrinking rapidly like a fire doused with ice water and leaving behind the acrid smell of burning flesh and thickening soot.
Marni's body collapsed back into the bottom of the grave. Her face, which had been hideously wide-eyed, slowly relaxed. Her eyes stiffly closed, and the bluish pallor of her skin turned dead gray—once again, a cold, lifeless corpse. The strands of red thread that had been wrapped around Karto's ankles and neck came loose, crumbling into black ash that washed away with the wet earth.
Karto collapsed at the edge of the grave. His blood-spurting hand trembled violently above the ground. He gasped for breath, drawing in the night air, which now felt astonishingly pure—free of the suffocating cold and fishy stench that had haunted every breath since yesterday. The blackish bruise around his neck, which had felt like a coil of searing wire, now loosened. The burning sensation slowly faded, leaving behind a dull ache that his battered body could finally tolerate.
"Is it... over...?" Karto whispered, his hoarse voice barely audible.
But his reverie was shattered by the pounding footsteps of many people drawing closer from the rice-field embankment below the hill. Golden torchlight began to pierce the gaps between the frangipani trees.
"That scream came from the cemetery!"
"Hurry! Don't let Karto get away!"
The enraged villagers of Sukamerta Village were getting closer. Karto knew that although the supernatural terror of the Red Pocong had ended with blood spilling across Marni's forehead, the terror posed by his fellow humans had only just begun. If the villagers found him kneeling over Marni's unearthed grave, his hands drenched in blood and a hoe beside him, there would be no mercy. He would be branded a grave desecrator, a practitioner of black magic, or even Marni's true murderer.
Fueled by the last surge of adrenaline in his body, Karto seized the hoe. He did not run. With the frantic madness of a possessed man, Karto hoed the red earth around the hole, leveling it back into the grave. Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! He covered Marni's body as quickly as he could, shutting the mori cloth and the girl's face away from the outside world once more.
Every mound of wet earth that struck the bottom of the hole felt like burying half his past. Karto packed the soil down with his feet, smoothing it until the mound looked as much as possible like an old, untouched grave. He threw Pak Saman's hoe into the undergrowth behind the hill, then crawled down the cliff behind the cemetery—a steep path choked with thorny bushes that faced away from the main grounds.
Just as Karto slid down into the darkness of the valley below the hill, more than a dozen villagers' torches reached the cemetery's summit.
"Where is he?!"
"Huh? Marni's grave is intact... but there's blood on the ground here!"
"Search around the hill! He must have run out of the village!"
The villagers' shouts soared into the night, but Karto no longer looked back. He kept crawling, letting the darkness and dense border forest conceal his filthy, blood-soaked body.
Three days passed since the harrowing night in Sukamerta Village.
On a mountain slope far from any settlement, in a no-man's-land crossed only by firewood gatherers, stood a ramshackle hut with a thatched roof. The icy mountain air cut to the bone, but it did not disturb the man kneeling on the damp ground beneath an ancient pine tree.
That man was Karto. His body was now much thinner, his cheeks hollow, and his face marked by permanent lines of exhaustion. His once-worn striped lurik shirt was now in tatters, stained with dirt and dried blood that had turned black. Around his neck, a blackish ring of bruised scar tissue had left a permanent mark—like a vile tattoo proclaiming that he was a man who had once survived a supernatural death snare.
Before him lay a mound of freshly wet earth that had just been leveled. Karto had not planted a gravestone over it. He had not carved anyone's name into wood. There was only a plain mound of earth without a marker, without flowers, and without prayers.
In that earth, Karto had buried Mbah Jambrong's black cloth pouch—along with his rusty sickle and the remnants of the red threads that had turned to ash. Karto had buried them very deep, sealing them with a promise that he would carry the vile secret of red magic and Marni's sacrifice to his own grave.
Karto brushed his palm, marked by a fresh cut, across his other hand. The wound stung in the night wind, but that pain reminded him that he was still breathing.
"Poverty blinded me..." Karto murmured, staring at the nameless mound before him. "I wanted to be rich, but all I got was filthy earth and blood on my hands."
Karto rose to his feet. He turned his back on the mound, with no intention of ever returning. Sukamerta Village was now nothing more than a memory filled with curses. Its people might remember him as a fugitive or a heretic who had fled, but to Karto, he no longer had a name, a home, or a future.
With slow, limping steps, Karto walked into the thin mountain fog, merging with the silent darkness of the forest and leaving the nameless grave to freeze beneath the night's cold.