Something strange happened last night... a non-fiction story from Sarawak, the land of magic.
“Can you come here for a moment,” said Maureen, who was busy preparing the breakfast. The smell of roasting toasts filled the kitchen and reached my home office. As I was occupied loading pictures to the internet, I felt somewhat reluctant to interrupt my work. But given her voice had an element of urgency. I stood up and walked to the kitchen.
“Look,” she said, and pointed to the ground. “Rice grains, scattered everywhere. Not only here in the kitchen, but also in the living room. I had vacuum-cleaned the house yesterday evening, before you came back from work. How strange.”
Maureen looked puzzled. I looked around. My eyes fell on the two rice containers, and a half-filled plastic bag, which wasn’t well closed-off. “Strange,” I mumbled. “A rat would have left traces. The wind could have scattered grains around the kitchen, but not that far into the living. Frankly, I do not have any good explanation.”
We sat down at our breakfast table. Maureen served toasted bread and coffee. She shrunk her shoulders. “I really don’t know either.”
Then we followed our daily routines, and both of us forgot yesterday’s event.
Until this morning. “I didn’t sleep well last night,” said Maureen. “Something strange has happened. At 2 am I woke up. I had to go to the washroom. The house was very silent, and I felt uneasy. You were deeply asleep at that time, and I didn’t want to wake you up. ..
“Passing along the living I saw something I had never seen before…up in the village there were so many stories about them, but I never believed anything.”
“What was it,” I asked with a mix of curiosity and concern. Over the last month I had witnessed so many events of black magic that I felt quite uneasy. Maureen pointed to the bottle of chili ketchup which stood next to my noodle dish.”
“It was roughly the size of this bottle,” she said.
“Was it an animal?” I asked. Maureen shook her head.
“It was no animal and no ordinary ghost. It was the Toyoll.”
“What did you see? What is a Toyoll,” I inquired.
“I saw it running from the kitchen to the living. I felt so scared by its presence. I never believed these things could exist,” she whispered.
“The Toyoll are like people, but only seven inch high. Not taller than the chili ketchup bottle next to your mee plate. The Toyoll I saw was female. It had long, black hair, down to the feet. I couldn’t see her face. I was so scared, and ran away.”
Stories, told to me long ago by Grandma came to my mind. Ruebezahl’s little men, the gnomes and kobolds of the medieval mines, the trolls of Norway were back.
“What are they doing here, in our house” I asked.
“Frankly, I don’t know,” answered Maureen. “In my village they told us that Toyolls are the souls of unborn children, who fall prey to the evil spirit. The Toyoll can bring bad luck to your house, or steal things that have special power. But what it precisely means for us, I have no clue.”
“I don’t know, Maureen. In our tradition these little men are not really evil, just a bit cheeky. Perhaps we shouldn’t feel afraid.”
We finished our breakfast, and I went to carry out my daily exercise of prayers and meditation. After a while, the shadow of this strange story was gone. I went to see Maureen.
“Perhaps we should try to make friends with the little men,” I said. “Put some rice as offering to them on the ground and also on the balcony. Probably it was them who had scattered the rice.”
Grab those side-irons, saddle up and join former Civil War sharpshooter Luther Henry for a ride into pure terror, western-style…think ‘Wild Wild West’ meets ‘The X-Files’.
