There is a smell that comes before she does. Frangipani. The graveyard flower of the Malay world, white petals planted among headstones because the living thought the dead deserved something beautiful. The scent drifts through the dark, sweet and thick, and then it shifts. The sweetness curdles. What you smell now is rot. She is close.

The Malay peoples of Southeast Asia call her a Pontianak. The word is a contraction of perempuan mati beranak: "woman who died in childbirth." She is the ghost of a mother who bled out on a birthing mat, or was killed by a lover, or simply died in a world where women died bringing life into it with devastating regularity. She wears white. Her hair falls past her waist, covering the back of her neck where the hole is. Her nails are long enough to open a man from throat to belly. She is beautiful. She is always ...