by Andrew J. West

When Pawn tells her parents she wants to study art at Silpakorn University, they don’t like the idea at all. Her father says she should go to Thammasat University and find a nice young man with the right family connections and a promising career to marry. That’s where he’d met her mother. Pawn insists though, saying she’d studied art at school and always got an A for it, the same as she did for every subject, so she saw no reason why she wouldn’t become a famous artist if Thailand’s most famous art school accepted her.

 “At Silpakorn you’ll only meet artists, and that’s no career for a husband, let alone a woman. So tell me why you suddenly want to study art of all things?” her father persists.

Pawn, who was used to always getting her own way, says, “I’ve always gotten an A for art because I’m very talented, Daddy. And I’ll never be happy unless you get me into Silpakorn.”

Her father, a very religious man, says, “Go to the temple and give money to the monks to make merit, then I’m sure you’ll get into Silpakorn.”

Although she has already been accepted at Thammasat, one of the country’s top universities, to study liberal arts as her mother had done, what she hadn’t told her father was that she’d changed her mind because she’d heard that a girl from her art class at school, Lek, had been accepted into Silpakorn. Lek’s the daughter of a lowly schoolteacher from a village in the poorest part of Thailand, Isaan—who was only at Pawn’s exclusive girls’ school in Bangkok because she’d been given a scholarship by the New Zealand government—and she had never got an A for her artwork. And if the daughter of a peasant like Lek from a shack in Isaan who Pawn recalled had made a “sculpture” out of hair for her graduation work could be accepted into Thailand’s most prestigious art school, then Pawn with her beautiful still-life watercolours of flowers and portraits of her wealthy parents would do fabulously.

Pawn had overheard many of the meetings her father, a senior army general, held at home with his staff and businessmen and knew he had grown rich over the years by helping transform Isaan’s rainforests into eucalyptus plantations and golf courses. At the same time he’d also helped many of the local peasant farmers by buying up their rice paddies and turning them into salt fields. She was so proud of how her father had not only served their great nation in the military, but had been important in its economic development. But she also knew that she is the only thing her father loves even more than the country, and he wouldn’t deny his beloved daughter any wish, no matter what it might be.

The next week, after she returns from giving money to the monks at the temple, her father tells her that her generous merit-making had been successful, that he’d gone to see the teachers at Silpakorn and they’d agreed to accept her despite her not having applied or having sat the entrance exam. She gives him an enormous hug and kiss.

The next year, when Lek sees Pawn at the beginning of their first semester at Silpakorn, she is surprised, but Pawn says she shouldn’t be because she is more artistically talented than Lek, and so it is only natural she should be at the best art school.

“I always got an A in art,” says Pawn proudly, opening her portfolio and flipping through her still-lifes and portraits. “You only ever got a B.”

Lek, who was always quiet, says nothing.

Over the next semester Pawn and Lek share many of the same classes and, just like in school, Pawn is the most popular girl, while Lek remains mostly silent and alone. What does change, however, is their grades, with Lek getting straight A’s and Pawn only getting B’s. The next semester, though, she sees a university official having a meeting with her father at her home—he’d come to talk about buying land in Isaan—and she starts getting A’s again.

During their last year before graduating, Pawn enters her pictures into several of the annually held art competitions, as is usual for final year students. But not only does she not win any prizes, many of her still-lifes of flowers are not even selected for exhibition. What’s worse, Lek’s sculptures made from strands of her hair and mixed media works made from the rags worn by Isaan peasants win gold medals.

Pawn can’t understand it. Lek’s work isn’t beautiful at all. Pawn is shattered and when she tells her father, he advises her, “Go to the temple and give money to the monks to make merit, then I’m sure you’ll start to win prizes in the competitions.”

Pawn does as her father tells her, giving many thousands of baht to the monks, only this time it doesn’t help; when she enters her work into another competition, it wins nothing. Again, it isn’t even selected to show in the exhibition or catalogue that goes with it. Worse still, Lek wins yet another gold medal. There is even an article about her in Thailand’s biggest newspaper, Thai Rath, and a full-page feature in Bangkok Post in English.

At a loss to know what else to do, she asks for her father’s advice, and he tells her to go see the family fortune-teller. The fortune-teller advises that her only hope is to consult a mau phii, a spirit medium. She goes to the mau phii the fortune-teller recommends, who tells her she has to mix her own menstrual blood and excrement into her paint, only then will she have good luck in the art competitions. And the more she uses, the luckier she’ll become.

Pawn does as the mau phii tells her, collecting as much of her blood and feces as she can, and using her urine to clean the brushes. As the mau phii had promised, her pretty flowers blossom once fertilised with her bodily discharges, which changes the texture and colouration of the paint, giving it an unusual and eye-catching tincture. Suddenly, she wins a bronze medal in the painting section of an art competition, though Lek still wins the gold for an oil on canvas.

Pawn goes back to see the mau phii, bringing extravagant gifts and bundles of baht in thanks.

“But I still have yet to win a gold medal. That peasant, Lek from Isaan, always wins the gold. How can I win with her entering?” Pawn begs to know.

“You must get a phii tai hoeng. Use the fluids of the corpse to make your artwork, and command the spirit to dwell within it by reciting this formula,” she says, handing her a piece of rice paper with an inscription in Pāḷi, the ancient liturgical language of Buddhism.

Pawn is shocked and disturbed by what the medium had told her. A phii tai hoeng—a ghost who dies wrongly—is the most evil of all spirits and only comes about by a violent death; the more violent, the more malevolent. Not knowing what else to do, she goes to her father and tells him what the mau phii had told her. Her father smiles and tells her she shouldn’t kill anybody, but that she shouldn’t worry.

As graduation approaches, Pawn, like all the students in her year, is preparing for the grad show. She feels the spirits are favouring her because she has a very heavy period, squatting over a can of red paint so not a drop is wasted, and she eats more fast food than usual so she will have more shit to paint with.

She is in her studio at the campus when she hears a rumour from another student that something terrible has happened to Lek’s father. Pawn immediately goes to see Lek, who she hardly ever speaks to, stopping her just as she’s leaving her studio and pretending to run into her by accident.

“Oh, Lek… How nice to see you. You look very upset. What’s happened?” asks Pawn.

“I have to go home to Isaan,” replies Lek distractedly. “Something has happened to my father.”

Pawn blocks her way. “I’m very sorry to hear that. I hope it’s nothing too serious.”

“My father is missing. It’s very strange. The villagers say they heard gunshots and there was a lot of blood, but no body. Excuse me, Pawn, I have to go.”

“Sorry, just one second.” Pawn takes Lek by the hand. “Why would anybody want to hurt your father? He’s just a schoolteacher, isn’t he?”

Lek mumbles anxiously in response as Pawn squeezes her hand in hers. “He was going to lead a protest against a large salt farmer. The salt farm had been spoiling the rice in the paddy fields of many small farmers and killing the fish in the local river. The farmers, who now can’t grow any rice, are being forced to sell their degraded farms for a fraction of their value.”

“Do you think it was them who did this?” inquires Pawn.

“The people who own the salt farm are very rich and powerful. Whoever stands up to people like them are rounded up by the police or killed by gunman, but it can never be proven.” Lek pulls her hand free. “I’m sorry, Pawn, but I really have to go now.”

After Lek leaves for Isaan, Pawn takes the opportunity to look around her competitor’s studio. Lek had fired several clay pots and inscribed them with some magical formulae Pawn doesn’t understand. “Oh, well,” she mutters under her breath to herself. “These pots aren’t beautiful at all. I still have a chance to steal the show.”

 Back at her studio, she is surprised to find her father, who had never been to visit her at uni, waiting.

“What are you doing here, Daddy?”

“I’ve brought a present for my darling daughter.”

Pawn notices a long wooden box sitting in her space. The box is nailed shut, but her father has a crowbar, levers it open and throws off the lid. Inside is the bullet-riddled body of a middle-aged man. Pawn falls backwards and gasps in fright.

“Wh-wh-what is this?” she stammers.

“It’s your phii tai hoeng. You know nothing is ever too much for you to ask of me, my sweet Pawn,” replies her father, smiling almost tearfully with love and affection.

“Who is, or was, it?”

“Not to worry, my dear. He was just a criminal troublemaker who was shot by the police for disturbing the peace. If his body and spirit can make my daughter happy, then he will have done far more good after his death than he ever did before it.”

He kisses Pawn and leaves.

After purchasing a meat grinder and industrial chipper, she goes to work. First, she slices the meat from the bone. Next, she purées the soft tissue of the corpse in the grinder and mixes it in with many tins of multicoloured paint. After that, she shatters the body’s bones in the chipper and adds it to the macabre mix as well, giving her clotted paints a distinctive grainy quality.

Finally, she can begin work on her masterpiece, a massive canvas that will take up nearly the entire wall of a room in the gallery. While doing so, she recites the Pāḷi incantation written down by the medium over and over, summoning the phii tai hoeng, the malign spirit, into the artwork. It’s as if she is possessed or sunk deep into a morbid trance, but when she comes out of her absorption she finds she has spread the pulpy paint spontaneously into an unpremeditated abstract expressionist concoction, the first non-figurative metaphysical piece she has ever created.

At the grad show, everybody who sees Pawn’s painting is beside themselves. Her father and mother are so proud of their remarkably talented daughter. Several reporters come to the show to see Lek, but although other students had installed her pots for her in a space next to Pawn’s painting, she has yet to return from Isaan. They are drawn instead like moths to the intense light of Pawn’s pièce de résistance, practically fighting with each other to photograph and film it and interview the creator of the stunning work.

After the reporters leave and the last of the other students have gone off to celebrate their graduation, Lek arrives from Isaan, finding Pawn and her parents alone in the room of the gallery displaying their artworks.

“Lek!” says Pawn grinning widely, “I’m so glad to see you. Don’t you just love my painting?”

Lek takes one look at Pawn’s canvas and is transfixed, too dumbstruck to utter a single syllable.

“Isn’t it just too wonderful for words,” says Pawn’s mother.

Lek slowly reaches out and touches the paint, rubbing her fingers across the gritty surface. “What evil is this?” she asks. “Pawn, what evil have you done to make this? You must take it down at once!” Lek starts trying to take the canvas off the cement wall, but it’s too large and heavy for one person to handle.

“What are you trying to do, Lek! Stop that!”

“What black magic have you done? You’re an evil sorceress, Pawn!”

As Lek pulls at the frame trying to detach it, Pawn panics. She raises her hands and shouts out the incantation she’d been taught by the medium. The incantation summons the phii tai hoeng, the bits and pieces of whose crushed and shattered body rises off the canvas and, in a cyclonic storm, reforms once more into the shape they had been when alive.

“Kill her!” Pawn commands the reanimated being.

Lek recognises her father, no matter how gruesome he has become. “Father!” she cries, reaching out to him, but he backs away from his daughter.

“Kill her! I command you! Kill her!” shouts Pawn, pointing at Lek.

Instead, the spirit dissolves into a river of red flames that flow in a flood of burning blood toward Pawn, engulfing her body, pouring in through every orifice until filling her completely. Pawn, her eyes and mouth glowing scarlet with the inferno ablaze inside her, rises into the air and levitates toward her father, repeating as if a mantra, “This is your karma… This is your karma… This is your karma…”

Her mother rushes off screaming insanely, while her father, paralysed with fear cries, “No, Pawn, I love you more than anything! I’d do anything for you! I’ve done everything for you!”

Pawn floats above her father, circling like a shark above its prey, then dives down and wraps her hands around his throat. It’s as if the flesh of her thumbs and fingers have become sharpened steel, and she slices off her father’s head as though striking him simultaneously with the sweeping blades of two Samaria scimitars. Blood spurts out in a fountain from the quivering decapitated corpse, and Pawn falls back against the wall as the phii tai hoeng flows out of her body in a blazing river, releasing her.

She picks up her father’s head, embracing it, sobbing, as the fiery spirit spirals in a vortex of pulverised body parts until reforming into the semblance of a mangled human shape before the now blank canvas.

“Please, Lek,” shrieks Pawn. “I didn’t know about your father.”

“And you didn’t know that my father taught me to read, write and speak Pāḷi, the ancient language used by the monks, when I was a girl either, did you, Pawn? Do you have any idea what the incantation you said means?”

“No, I don’t. I don’t know anything,” she snivels.

“Your formula means, ‘My obeisance is to the demon Mara, who takes life and gives back death to everyone who does not worship Him.’”

“Mara, the evil enemy of Buddha? No, I didn’t know! Please, you can’t hurt me,” pleads Pawn.

“Father,” says Lek to the spirit, “please spare her. She didn’t know what she was doing.”

But a phii tai hoeng, even when originally the spirit of a good man like Lek’s father, is vengeful and malicious. He floats toward Pawn, who screams in terror. Lek is helpless to stop what happens next. The phii tai hoeng picks up Pawn by the ankles and smashes her body against the canvas like a ragdoll in the hands of a spiteful child, slamming her against it again and again until she becomes a grisly mash of broken bones, impregnating her blood and brains into the weave of the fabric. He bashes her with such a powerful rage, she ruptures and her insides fly out, slathering her disembowelled entrails and organs across the canvas.

In the end there is nothing left but a pair of bloody feet, which fall to the floor. The spirit, having vented its anger, collapses to its knees and looks up at Lek.

“Father,” sobs Lek, and she says in Pāḷi, “Please don’t roam the world of the living. You need to go to the Land of the Dead.” She goes over to her earthenware pots, which she had inscribed with magical formulae to help transport the dead to the afterlife, picks up the largest, and opens the lid. “Father,” she continues in Pāḷi, “place yourself inside this pot. I will take you to the Chao Phraya River and release you. You will float out to sea and wash up in the Land of the Dead.”

The spirit understands the sacred language and does as instructed. Lek seals the lid on the pot and carries it to the Chao Phraya River which flows nearby the campus. While uttering a magical incantation to ensure her father’s spirit rests in peace in the Land of the Dead, she carefully floats the pot on the gently lapping waves and prays as it drifts slowly away.

Editor’s Note:

You can view a larger picture of the drawing for this story by clicking on the picture at the top or going to the page.

Note on Author’s Work:

Art of Evil is not Andrew J. West’s first story in Eastlit. He also had The Mansion published in the June issue of Eastlit.