Come, Shadow Soul!

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. It was warm, I remember—near the end of summer, approaching thirty-one degrees. I was sweating in my sheets, not yet climatized to the blistering lowlands of Nepal. While I tossed and turned, the other orphans snored, dead to the world. Now that I think about it, maybe it wasn’t the heat keeping me awake—it could have also been the bed. The others had high-raised bunks with cotton blankets. I slept on a cot on the ground. One of the American volunteers fetched it from the attic the day I arrived, and the straw inside was so coarse, it left red imprints scattered down my shoulder blades.

There were multiple reasons as to why I slept on the floor. For one, I could press my cheek against the stone, which was cool and soothed my inflamed, often sunburnt skin. Secondly, the orphanage was overcrowded and there weren’t many beds to go around to begin with. I think that was the reason my last orphanage sent me away. We slept shoulder to shoulder there, sometimes packed on top of each other like sandwiches. It smelled like dirty laundry, the flies took chunks out of our eyelids, and we were getting sick. One day they threw half of us into the back of a truck, and I ended up at Happy Home.

The headmaster introduced me as Liswini to the other children, the American volunteers and the staff. Everyone was given a girl name at Happy Home orphanage, even if you were a boy. And that ultimately leads to the third reason why I slept on the floor: from the moment I arrived at that place, the other children hated me. I was stupid, you see. At least, that’s what they told me—I couldn’t read or write, I got angry when it was loud, and I avoided eye contact with everyone. Someone would tell me to “break a leg,” and I would cry, thinking they were serious. So instead of sharing a bunk with a friend, I slept on the ground by the porch, where I could watch the sunset sink silently behind the Himalayas. I never even knew the cabin was there until that night, when the village plummeted into darkness, and I saw a small array of light illuminating the hillside. I rolled over in my cot, squinting at the decrepit shack, wondering how I had never noticed it before.

Then I saw something that made me shiver despite the heat—a shadow, moving quickly across the yellowed window pane. Before I could properly register what the shadow was, the candle blew out, the light winking out of existence. My heart thrummed in my ears as I sat up and carefully made my way outside. The weathered porch creaked beneath me, and I stepped gingerly across it, determined not to wake anyone. I’m not sure what drew me to inspect the cabin so late at night—again, I wasn’t very smart—but also there was a part of me that thought maybe the shadow was mine.

A human being had two different kinds of souls. I knew this, because it was a memory: my mother told me the story while braiding my hair. The So, and the Bla. The So was simply your life force, she had said. The Bla were your nine shadow-souls; the souls that would be reborn into new life forms after your death. While the Bla normally resided in the body, they could easily become lost or captured by some sort of evil.

I was certain one of my shadow souls was missing. It was why I couldn’t read, why I got angry when it was loud, why the other children thought I was stupid. It was also why I couldn’t remember my mother’s face. She was simply a blank canvas in my head—I couldn’t even tell you her eye colour. Sometimes I surprised myself, though, and remembered the small things. For example, I did know that my mother would refuse to kill spiders because she thought she would become them in her next life.

“Bla kho,” I whispered. Come, shadow soul.

The candle in the window flickered to life. I gasped, my breath catching in my throat. Shaking, I stepped off the porch and started down the winding dirt path leading away from the orphanage. The forest closed in around me. Large ferns brushed against my legs, and the ground was littered with prickly pine needles. It was cooler in the forest, I noticed—the trees had spread out across the sky, blocking out the stars. A spiderweb collided with my mouth and I clawed desperately at my tongue trying to get it out.

Eventually I made it to the cabin, which I now noticed was actually a garden shed. A rusty wheelbarrow filled with pot soil leaned against the side of the building. The walls were peeling with grey strips of paint, resembling overgrown, curly fingernails. This whole time, the candle had been my beacon guiding me through the forest. I watched as a white hand reached up and smothered it.

Then, silence. I froze in place, staring at the empty darkness where the hand had been. I knew it was my shadow soul, and I knew I had to save it—but for the life of me, I couldn’t get my feet to work. After some failed attempts, I managed to speak: “It’s—it’s okay, I’m here now.” I whispered. “Can you open the door?”

I was met with the sound of my own breathing. The wooden steps swooned beneath me as I trudged forward, biting my lip and pulling on the door handle. Inside the shed, the stench of mold hung in the air like fog, and the wind murmured through the floorboards. The shelves were lined with rusty tools, dead plants and broken watering cans. Spiderwebs hung from the ceiling, weighed down by so much dust they resembled phlegm. I looked around but there was nobody there.

The door creaked shut behind me. It was such a slow, deliberate movement that I never noticed it was happening until it was too late. I spun around, covering my mouth with my hands. That paralyzing fear came on again, and all I could do was stand there, chills racing down my spine.

A figure emerged from the darkness. It was twice my size, and I could make out nothing other than the general shape of it—human-like, with long, spindly fingers.

What was one supposed to do once they found their shadow soul? How was it supposed to return to my body?

“Do you have a name?” I asked it, and the shadow stayed as it was—completely still. The longer the silence continued, the deeper my anxiety rooted itself.

The shadow grabbed my arm. I yelped, but all it did was curl something into my palm, then let go. I traced my thumb over the grooves embedded in the wax.

“I can’t keep it lit,” the shadow whispered.

I held my breath. “Do you have a match?”

The shadow gave me a handful of old dried-out matches. I struggled to get them to catch. Finally, on the fifth one, the shed was cast in a flickering orange-yellow light. I gasped at the sight of my shadow soul: it had taken the form of a woman much older than me. Her under eyes were long, deep and hollow. Blood coated the front of her paper-thin shirt, and her skin was as pale as a moonbeam.

I realized I was wrong—she wasn’t my shadow soul after all.

“You’re a ghost.” I said it simply, staring at her dark eyes, the yellowed corneas. The shadow woman gazed emptily into the distance.

“Sometimes I feel like one.”

I had never met a ghost before. It was terrifying, to say the least—but not as scary as one might expect. She seemed nice. My eyes fell to the blood soaking through her shirt. “Whose blood is that?”

The ghost looked down at herself, almost lazily. “Mine.” She stared out the window. “I thought you were someone else. He comes for me when it gets dark.”

I frowned, wondering who would be visiting a ghost in a garden shed this late at night.

The ghost looked at me. “You’re from the orphanage?” I nodded. “You look familiar. You're Tamang, like me?”

I paused, then nodded again. I couldn’t remember the last time someone had recognized my heritage. At the orphanages, we spoke either English or Nepali, and my Tibeto-Burmese roots were slowly starting to degrade—just like the memories of my mother. The ghost smiled sadly, as if she understood.

Something snapped in the woods outside the shed. The ghost’s face fell. “You should leave before he comes back.”

“Before who comes back?”

The candle flickered as the ghost placed her head in her hands, causing shadows to dance upon the walls. “He wants to take me far away from here. If he does that, I’ll never be able to find my son.”

I shifted on my feet as she cried. Was it death she was running from? If I stayed here, would death suddenly manifest itself in front of me and try to wrestle her into the afterlife? I had only known the ghost for a few moments, but I already knew I couldn’t let that happen. I would do anything to save her.

“What if I take you to the orphanage? You could hide there until morning.”

“No! I can’t go there!” The ghost backed away from me as if I had slapped her. “You shouldn’t go back there either; it’s dangerous.”

“What do you mean?”

Outside the shed, another twig snapped. The ghost dragged me to the back of the building, then pulled me onto a table, ushering me out the window. In our haste, I accidentally knocked over the candle.

I looked down at her, one leg hanging out the sill, half of my body wedged through the pane. She had returned to her shadow form, standing as still as a statue.

“Bla kho,” I whispered, my chin trembling. Come, shadow soul.

The shadow reached up and touched my hand. “You must remember your true name, or you will be lost forever.”

Just as I heard the door to the shed squeal open, I dropped out the window and ran. Someone shouted after me; I knew they had seen me, but I kept running anyway. I dashed through the thick forest, tripping over my own feet. Eventually I made it to the orphanage, where I found one of the American volunteers standing on the porch. She looked tense, and was shining her phone flashlight into the darkness. Jessica, a nineteen-year-old girl with light skin and a blonde ponytail, waved as she spotted me.

“Liswini! Where did you run off to? I was looking everywhere for you.”

I nearly stumbled into her, gasping. Jessica dropped her phone as she caught me in her skinny arms. “What happened to you, kid?”

“There’s a girl in the garden shed. She’s hurt and she needs help!” I figured it was best to leave out the ghost part, in case she didn’t believe me. Jessica’s eyes widened. She let go of me and rushed inside the building. A minute later, a group of staff members brandished their flashlights and trudged into the forest, quite literally racing to beat the devil.

***

The next morning, most of the volunteers had gone back to America—including Jessica. We were told their summer term was over, and now they had to go home to their families.

I started openly talking about the ghost. The other children said I was full of it, but then some strangers arrived at Happy Home in a black van. They took me aside and listened to me closely.

That same day, the headmaster quit. The strangers walked into his office and he simply was no longer there; clothes and files were strewn about the floor, and the desk was empty, the chair toppled over. Our lives were in the hands of the newcomers. It ended up being a good thing, actually: I ate so much I thought I was going to die, we all got baths, and they even gave me a bed to sleep in. Happy Home was no longer referred to as an orphanage—it was now a “transit home.”

Everything was perfect. Until the examinations, that is. After dinner, they took me to the doctor, where I stood as stiff as a board as they weighed me, measured me, then cut my hair. Once the doctor was done prodding away at my flesh, he was replaced with a young woman holding a clipboard.

“My name is Aravi. What’s yours?” She smiled patiently at me. The ghost’s words echoed in my head as I swallowed, then told her.

“What a beautiful name!” Aravi clicked her pen and adjusted her glasses. “This next part is easy. I’m going to ask you a few questions, and then hopefully—if all goes well—we can return you to your family. Is that something you would like, Liswini?”

My eyes widened twice their size. I barely remembered my family; I never even considered that I could return to them.

But then Aravi proceeded to ask me a lot of things I couldn’t answer. She wanted a Social Security Number, to know what my parent’s names were, what city I was born in, what my last name was. Every time I shook my head, her nose would scrunch up the tiniest bit. Once it was over, she quietly sent me outside, and I heard her speak to the doctor before the door fully closed: “I don’t think there’s anything I can do for that one.”

The children buzzed around me. Some of them had already gotten in contact with their families; others were not as lucky and were being sent to another orphanage in the morning. Slowly, I wandered back to the porch, where I stood outside and gazed out at the garden shed.

I thought about what the doctor told me before he left. He affirmed to me that I wasn’t stupid; the children were just mean. He said I was showing signs of high-functioning autism. I wasn’t sure what that was, exactly—but I did know it meant I wasn’t missing any of my shadow souls. All of my pieces were intact; there was nothing wrong with me. So why couldn’t I remember anything about my parents?

After a couple minutes of staring at the garden shed, I felt something tickle against my hand. There was a woodlouse spider, crawling between the valleys of my knuckles. Holding my breath, I watched as it traversed from one finger to the other, rubbing its legs into tiny balls of silk. Woodlouse spiders had fangs, but they mostly ate lice, and their venom posed no danger to humans. What if I was actually holding my mother’s Bla? I wasn’t entirely sure if she was even alive. I cupped the spider in my hands, flinching as it bit me.

I was kidnapped.

Oh, my god—I was kidnapped. The memory hit me like a steam train, but I stood as still as a statue, as unmoving as the ghost girl. My mother was going to send me to school. We lived high up in the Himalayas, in a rural village where we made clothes and bred sheep. I was four years old. The recruiters came; they said they would take me to Kathmandu, and they did—but not in the way they were supposed to. I became a false orphan, ripped from my family like a Band-Aid. The American volunteers would donate to the orphanages because of our poor living conditions, but none of it was real. None of it.

The only thing that was real was my mom. I remembered her clearly, now. Her angular voice, her soft hair, the crisp brown of her eyes. She must have searched for me when I never came home for the summer. She must have scoured all of Nepal looking for me. And she found me, the other day, in the garden shed. But it was too late. When she announced why she was there, the headmaster tortured and killed her.

Aravi exited the building, closing the door gently behind her. She came out to check on me, she said.

“My name is Milo Tamang,” I told her. “My dad and my sister live in Humla. I want to see them.”

Aravi blinked, and for a moment, she said nothing. Then her face split into a huge grin. “Stay right here, I’ll be back. Don’t worry Milo; we’re going to find them.”

I sat down on the edge of the porch and closed my eyes, thinking about our little farmhouse, the massive herds of goats and sheep. I remembered my sister’s paintings and the big platter of dumplings my father liked to boil for us. When I opened my eyes again, I watched as my mother propped open the window to the garden shed. She was waving at me. The wind blew the leaves through her hair, and she was smiling.