"Yusof Tajuddin may have liked the Japanese, and Mas have tolerated them, but both shuddered at memories of what King's Pavilion had been during the occupation. "This not good place, mem," Mas used to say. Yusof Tajuddin, in his impeccable RP English, was more explicit. King's Pavilion had been used as a centre of torture and interrogation. Dried blood, irremovable with any amount of Vim, stained the floor of the main bathroom, through whose open channels much blood had flowed. Yusof Tajuddin explained the peculiar chill of the bathroom, otherwise inexplicable in a house with few fans on which the sun beat, in psychic terms : the frozen hands of death clutched it still and would clutch it for ever. A Scottish engineer of intense scepticism entered the bathroom on our invitation and came out shuddering. In the raintrees and banyans at sunset, Yusof the cook alleged, the voices of the tortured and executed could be heard complaining. Lynne and I could not hear these voices, but we knew Yusof to be superstitious in the manner of his race. He found hantu-hantu (or hantu 2) everywhere. I do not know the etymology of the word, which means ghost, but have often wondered whether there is some ancient connection, through Sanskrit, with haunt. For Yusof everything was haunted. His middle finger, or jari hantu, was haunted and must be careful about what it touched. He had seen a hantu bangkit, a sheeted ghost risen from the grave that, prevented from walking by its winding sheet, had rolled towards Yusof with evil intent. He had seen the hantu belian or tiger ghost. There was a kitchen ghost, disguised as a mat, that sometimes reared itself at him and made him smash the crockery. There were gnomes in the soil, hantu tanah, and the owl, or burong hantu, was a literal ghost-bird that stared at him and made him scream in his sleep. He knew all the hantu-hantu or hantu 2. The voices in the banyans were nothing compared with the visible ghosts with trailing entrails or the spectral huntsman (hantu pemburu), but they were there. We had better believe it."