A GHOST STORY IN A LAND OF DISBELIEF

In a culture that believes the spirit does not wander, the unexplained becomes an even more profound challenge to reason.

- write here write now AA PATAWARAN

I saw the animal inside my room at the Roha Hotel in Lalibela, Ethiopia. It was not a flash of shadow or the kind of afterimage that a tired mind would invent. I saw white fur, a low, sleek length, and the sudden, silent ripple of a catlike movement. It crossed the floor with purpose and vanished, and it should not have been there. The windows were closed and latched and the door had not been opened since I entered. Yet the animal appeared and disappeared with the assurance of something that belongs.

I called reception. Two men arrived with the kind of politeness reserved for foreign panic. They checked the wardrobe and the curtains and the corners and even under the bed. I watched them go through the room with method. I was calm in that moment. They found nothing. There was no sign that anything had entered or escaped. They left. I was alone again.

Night in that hotel had a private intelligence. The building was a quadrangle, and in the center of it was a patch of forest that was not ornamental. The trees were old and the growth dense. You felt it breathe. Around midnight I left the room to steal the wireless signal that lived only in reception, which was housed in a separate wing through a connecting passage. I followed the corridor with my eyes on the lit face of my iPad. I circled the inner courtyard. I saw a fire extinguisher cabinet, a potted fern, and a dark window pane with a crack on one side, then I saw them again. I walked a full circuit, then another, before I realized that the opening to the other building, which had been there moments ago, was gone. The seamless, white-painted wall had closed over it. It was as if the corridor had been rearranged behind me, or was rearranging itself as I walked. Fear came not as shock but as a slow rising that touched the spine and stayed. I stopped looking for reception and hurried back to my door.