The page was still open in Ninda's hands when the Maghrib call to prayer drifted from the prayer room outside the alley.
A name stopped halfway through being written. Only a few letters, in black ink that had begun to spread at the edges of the paper. Ninda lowered her head, trying to read its shape without touching it. The first letter looked like an R or a K. After that came a long line, then the mark of pen pressure that had abruptly stopped.
She didn't know whether the writer had been stopped by someone or something.
The muezzin's voice flowed over the rooftops, clear before being cut off by the alley walls. The empty row house changed in an instant. The light from the window, gray only moments ago, turned deep blue. The air inside the room dropped several degrees, carrying the smell of wet earth that couldn't possibly have come from the dry floor.
Ninda slipped the page into a plastic folder.
“Get out now,” she told herself.
She didn't need to say it twice. That was one of the few things she could still control.
She slung her bag over her shoulder and slipped her phone into her jacket pocket. She checked the screen: 6:07 p.m., forty-two percent battery. There were three unanswered messages from Bagas and one missed call from an unknown number.
The call came in again.
The screen lit up in her hand.
Unknown number.
Ninda answered without thinking. Her work habits made her more afraid of missing information than of a stranger calling.
“Hello?”
There was no answer.
On the other end, she heard soft breathing. Not the hiss of a bad connection. Breathing close to the microphone, steady, as if someone were walking with the phone held in front of their mouth.
“Who is this?”
Ninda headed for the door. The key she'd left on top of the doorframe was gone. She glanced around the room. Wooden table, broken chair, wall marked with nail holes, folder of notes. No key.
A woman's voice whispered through the phone, “Ninda.”
She stopped.
The voice sounded like a mother calling her child from the kitchen. Warm, familiar, and wrong. Ninda didn't know its owner, but her body recognized the intonation. A small tug formed at the back of her head, like a memory trying to escape a locked place.
“Who?” Ninda asked again, louder.
“Ninda.”
Something scraped along the wall outside the room.
Not footsteps. The sound was long and harsh, then stopped directly on the other side of the door.
Ninda switched to speakerphone. There was no option to record the call. The timer kept running on the screen: 00:31, 00:32. She wanted to photograph the number, but her hand was too busy gripping the phone.
“Ninda, come home.”
This time, the voice changed.
It became Bagas's voice.
She took a step back.
“Bagas?”
There was no answer. Only the same breathing, too steady for someone speaking from an office or the side of a busy road.
A shadow passed beneath the door. Thin and long. Then it returned.
Ninda approached the door with a small wrench she'd found on the floor. It was rusty and too light to make her feel safe, but it was enough to remind her hand not to be empty. She reached for the doorknob.
The knob turned on its own.
The door opened two inches.
From the dark gap outside came a voice calling her name. This time it was an old woman's voice. Then a child's. Then Ninda's own.
“Ninda.”
“Ninda.”
“Ninda.”
The calls didn't come from one place. They spread along the alley, bouncing off the wet walls, as though countless mouths were hiding behind the peeling paint. The phone in Ninda's hand suddenly felt hot. The call timer stopped at 00:47.
She ended the call.
All the sounds cut off at once.
The silence was worse.
Ninda shoved the door open with her shoulder. It opened all the way, but the alley outside was no longer the same alley she'd entered an hour ago. The distance to the mouth of the alley had grown longer. The houses on either side seemed to have shifted backward. Between the rooftops and walls, the sky was already black, without a trace of evening light.
The call to prayer had ended. Somewhere in the distance, a motorcycle roared, but the sound came as if from the bottom of a well.
Ninda stepped outside.
She didn't run. Not yet. She walked quickly, counting her steps. One, two, three. On the right was a wall with a poster of a council candidate whose face had peeled away. Four, five. On the left was a broken bucket. Six, seven.
The banyan tree still didn't appear.
Behind her, the door of the empty house swung shut slowly.
Ninda looked back. There was no one there. Only the door moving slightly before coming to a stop.
Her phone vibrated.
Another call came in.
This time, the number on the screen was her own.
Ninda stared at it until her heart pounded against her ribs. She didn't answer. The vibration stopped. Two seconds later, a voice message came in.
She didn't play it.
Something came running from ahead.
Its movement wasn't clear, only a shift of black between two wall lamps. Ninda stepped back and raised the wrench. The shadow leaped from the side of the alley and struck the air in front of her face. The force of it made her eyes water.
She fell, her palms slamming against the ground. Her phone slipped free and skidded several inches. The wrench rolled toward the gutter.
The shadow stopped over her.
Ninda smelled rotting leaves and fabric that had been stored too long in a damp place. There was a sound like many people speaking at once behind the walls, but she couldn't make out a single word. She saw something lower itself and draw closer, without any fixed shape. Sometimes it looked like a human shoulder. Sometimes like an animal's head, far too long.
Her phone began ringing again.
Her own number.
Ninda crawled toward it. Her fingertip was almost touching the screen when the shadow lunged.
Another body appeared between them.
It hadn't walked there.
It had appeared.
The tall man stood with his back to Ninda, one hand raised. The attacking shadow slammed into his arm, then was hurled into the wall without a sound of impact. The old paint trembled. Dust fell from above.
“Don't listen,” he said.
Wira's voice. Deep and flat, but this time something beneath it made Ninda's chest tighten too.
Wira didn't turn around. He faced the darkness moving at the end of the alley. His shirt remained straight across his back, but the fingers of his left hand curled as if he were holding back pain.
The shadow rose.
Wira moved.
Ninda caught only three fragments: a flash of golden eyes, shoulders suddenly broader, and a hand moving too fast to follow. There was no sound of fighting. No screams. Only a pressure in the air that made the banyan leaves in the distance shudder, even though no wind entered the alley.
The dark figure retreated, shrinking into the gap between two houses. From there came a voice that was no longer a woman's, Bagas's, or Ninda's. The voice was old and hungry.
“Those who remember will be called.”
Wira stared toward the gap.
“Not tonight.”
For the first time, Ninda saw his face clearly in the flickering streetlight. His skin still looked human, but his eyes glowed from within. There was no reflection of the phone or the lamp in them. The light belonged to him alone. The shadow along his jaw moved, as if another shape were pressing from behind his face.
The dark figure vanished.
Wira remained silent until the sounds of the city began seeping back into the alley. Horns from the main road. Plates clinking in residents' homes. A cat meowing behind a fence.
Ninda was still sitting on the ground.
Wira finally turned around. His eyes had not returned to normal.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.” Ninda's voice was hoarse. “You?”
She looked at Wira's arm. The fabric near his elbow was torn, but there was no blood. A black line ran beneath his skin, like a stain slowly moving toward his wrist.
“None of your business.”
“If you hadn't shown up, you might have less to worry about now.”
Wira stared at her for a long time. The light in his eyes hadn't gone out, but it had weakened slightly.
“You went in after the call to prayer.”
“I went in before it.”
“And you still didn't come out.”
Ninda stood and picked up her phone. The screen was cracked in one corner, but it still lit up. The voice message from her own number was gone. She opened her call history. There were no incoming calls. No unknown numbers. Only an empty screen, as if she'd imagined everything.
Wira watched the phone.
“Don't look for the recording,” he said.
“That isn't your decision.”
“Here, sometimes it is.”
Ninda wanted to argue, but the words from the alley still clung to her mind. Those who remember will be called. The sentence was too clear to be a hallucination, too strange to put in a news report.
She looked into Wira's eyes.
“What was that?”
Wira didn't answer.
“The thing that called me?”
“Not a phone call.”
“The thing that attacked?”
“Not a question you can answer with notes.”
“Let me be the one to decide that.”
She said it because she was angry, because she was afraid, and because she'd seen Wira endure pain without asking for help. The three things blended into one impulse: don't leave me in the dark.
Wira took the phone from her hand, inspected the crack, then returned it. Their fingers didn't touch. He deliberately kept that distance between them.
“Go home,” he said.
This time, Ninda didn't immediately refuse.
They walked side by side toward the mouth of the alley. Wira didn't look back, but whenever something moved at the edge of Ninda's vision, he had already shifted to block it. Three steps ahead, then two. Like someone who had memorized how danger approached.
Outside, Semarang's air felt warm and noisy. Only then did Ninda realize her palms were trembling.
Wira stopped beneath a streetlight.
“Now you've seen it,” he said.
Ninda looked at him. “I've seen a lot of things. That doesn't mean I understand them.”
Wira's face became the face of an ordinary man again. Only his eyes still held a faint trace of light.
“Then stop asking questions like someone who doesn't know.”