The rain in Shaanxi didn't smell like the rain in Samosir.
Back in her hometown, Bahal-Bahal, the rain smelled of wet earth and the deep, volcanic life of Lake Toba.
Here, two hours outside the urban sprawl of her university, the rain was a cold, biting mist that smelled of damp wood, ancient dust, and the exhaustion of a four-year degree that felt like it was leading nowhere.
Maria Simanjorang adjusted her loosely tied bun, feeling the stray hairs plastered to her neck by the humidity.
Her shift at the rural café had ended late, and her feet throbbed in her cheap sneakers.
She pulled out her phone, the screen's glare harsh in the mountain darkness.
A message from her mother sat at the top of her notifications.
"Maria, your brother's tuition is due next week. Don't push yourself too hard, boru Hasian, but if you have a little saving..."
She frowned upon seeing the message.
The "sandwich generation" guilt hit her harder than the Shaanxi wind.
She was an Indonesian scholarship student in China, a Business major with a side of Literature, yet her bank account currently held enough for a bowl of noodles and maybe a bus ticket she couldn't afford to use.
She even worried about her rent, which would expire at the end of the year.
This dilapidated courtyard was the only place she could afford.
She had chosen this crumbling relic over a cramped room in a modern boarding house because she couldn't stand the feeling of being trapped between four concrete walls.
She was used to the spacious yards of Samosir, where the horizon belonged to everyone.
Even if this house was rotting, it had a yard. It had a view of the mountains. It had air.
The house sat perched on the rugged slope, a lonely sentry of grey stone.
From her porch, Maria could see the distant, flickering lights of the "urban village" where her university peers were likely drinking bubble tea or cramming in bright, heated libraries.
Up here, there was only the wind whistling through the pine needles and the oppressive silence of the highlands.
Clatter.
Maria froze, her hand gripping the creaky iron of the gate.
Entering the house, she tried to shake off the gloom that clung to her like the mountain mist.
She scrubbed the café grease from her skin in the makeshift bathroom, the lukewarm water barely cutting the chill that seemed to have settled into her very bones.
By 11:00 PM, she was wrapped in a thick ulos sarong she'd brought from home—a piece of her heritage to ward off the Shaanxi cold—clutching a mug of bitter tea.
The steam from the mug hit her face, but it brought little comfort.
As the house settled into the groaning silence of the midnight hours, her mind began its nightly, frantic accounting.
She pulled a small notebook from her bag, its edges frayed from constant handling.
In it, columns of figures stared back at her like accusations.
The math never changed, no matter how many times she recalculated.
Between the rent for this crumbling courtyard and the meager remittances she sent to Samosir, her savings were a joke—a thin, fragile shield against a world that demanded so much.
Her brother's tuition loomed like a tidal wave. She could see his face in her mind, bright and hopeful, unaware that his sister was counting every yuan, every jian, every bowl of noodles skipped.
If she failed to find a job after graduation, the "success story" of the Simanjorang family would collapse. She was the anchor for five siblings and her aging mother; if she drifted, they all sank. The pressure felt like a physical weight on her chest, heavier than the Shaanxi stone.
In the eyes of her village in Samosir, she was the "success story," the daughter who had crossed an ocean to conquer the future.
But here, in the biting Shaanxi wind, she was just a tired girl in a faded hoodie, scrubbing grease from tables to ensure her family stayed afloat.
She was the youngest daughter in a house of many—three older brothers and an older sister who had paved the way, and one younger brother who was her world.
The hole in their lives was shaped like their father, taken by a sudden accident when she was only a child.
He had left behind a widow and a house of orphans, but while the Simanjorangs were undeniably poor, they were rich in a way that couldn't be quantified in a ledger.
They were bound by a fierce, protective camaraderie; a loving, rowdy warmth that made the cold silence of this mountain feel like a physical wound.
The clock on her phone ticked past midnight, then drifted toward 1:00 AM.
The mountain wind howled through the cracks in the wooden walls, a mournful sound that mimicked the loneliness in her heart.
She stared at the dark ceiling, wondering if she would ever see the sapphire expanse of Lake Toba or the lush, green peaks of her home.
In that moment, she was as homesick as a soul could ever be.
She reached for the switch of her desk lamp.
With a sharp click, the warm amber glow vanished, plunging the room into ink-black darkness.
She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to force her mind toward sleep.
Tomorrow was another grueling day; she had the early morning shift at the café, and her body needed the rest even if her mind was still racing through her bank balance.
But then, the mountain stillness was shattered.
Thump. Thump-thump.
The silence of the house, which had felt like a heavy shroud only moments ago, suddenly pricked at her senses.
Maria bolted upright, sitting perfectly still. Her heart hammered against her ribs. That sound... it hadn't come from the wind or the settling of the old timber. It had risen from the backyard.
Specifically, from the heavy wooden hatch of the cellar.
Her breath hitched.
Despite the mountain chill, a cold sweat beaded across her forehead.
Her thoughts began to spiral into a frantic, jagged panic.
'Thieves?' The thought made her blood run cold. She was a lone woman in an isolated house, two hours from her university and a fifteen-minute trek from the nearest neighbor down a treacherous, unlit path.
Up here, if she screamed, the only thing that would answer would be the wind.
She gripped the edges of her blanket until her knuckles turned white. Her ears strained, reaching into the dark. Every shadow cast by the swaying pines now looked like a reaching hand; every groan of the house sounded like a heavy footstep.
She sat there, a statue of raw nerves and adrenaline. Her imagination began to populate the darkness with terrors.
Was it a prowler? A mountain animal? Or something worse like a restless spirit that had crawled out of the mountain soil?
She couldn't move. She stayed frozen, holding her breath until her lungs burned. She waited for the sound to repeat—hoping it wouldn't, yet terrified of the silence that followed.
Then came the sound that shattered the silence, a sound that changed everything.
It wasn't the heavy breathing of a man, the snarl of a beast, or the spectral rustle of a mountain spirit.
It was a thin, ragged sob.
A child's voice, wet with terror and raw with exhaustion, muffled by the thick, rotting wood of the cellar doors.
"What the hell?" Maria whispered to herself, her heart leaping into her throat.
'Was it a village child?' Her mind raced through the possibilities. Perhaps some local kid from the village below had been playing "dare" on the mountain and somehow fallen in this pitch black night had stumbled into the cellar of the "foreigner's house."
She grabbed her phone, the screen's glare stinging her eyes.
2:14 AM.
Who—or what—was in her cellar at this hour?
'Should I go to the neighbor's house?' she wondered.
Her thumb hovered over her contacts, trembling. The nearest neighbor was a steep, fifteen-minute trek down a lightless mountain path. If she left now, she'd be abandoning a crying child in the dark. If she called the police, a visa investigation would follow. As a foreigner on a strict scholarship, any police presence at her house was a risk she couldn't afford.
Moreover, her ingrained Indonesian politeness and paranoia warred with her common sense. She didn't want to wake the village elders and be accused of something she didn't do if she brought the whole village up here
"It's probably just a prank," she tried to convince herself. "Or a stray animal?"
But animals didn't sob with that heartbreakingly human cadence.
She stood frozen in the dark room. What if it was a trap? What if someone was using a child's cry to lure her out?
She tried to run a mental risk assessment, but the "Big Sister" instinct she'd honed raising her younger brother wouldn't let her stay hidden.
If a child was truly hurt on her property, she wouldn't be able to live with the silence that followed.
Steeling her nerves, she cracked the window open. The biting air rushed in.
"H-hello?" she called out, her voice trembling against the wind. "Is someone there?"
The weeping stopped abruptly.
For a heartbeat, there was nothing but the wind. Then, it was replaced by a frantic, desperate scratching against the wood, like a small, panicked bird trapped in a box.
Maria's hesitation snapped. She grabbed a heavy iron poker, and her phone for flashlight.
She stepped out into the courtyard. The air was biting, a cold that seemed to sink into her marrow.
Every step toward the cellar felt like walking through deep water. Her mind screamed at her to go back inside, to lock the door and wait for the sun, but the scratching grew louder, more desperate.
She reached the hatch. Her heart stopped.
The rusted iron bolt was still slid firmly into the 'locked' position from the outside.
The logic failed her. How could a crying child be inside a cellar that was bolted from the outside? There were no other entrances.
She didn't have time to wonder how. A child was crying underneath her feet.
"I'm opening it! Stay back!" she warned, her voice cracking as she threw the bolt. With a grunt, she heaved the door upward. The phone flashlight beam cut through the dust.
"Ehh..?" Maria breathed in shock.
It wasn't a local village girl in a puffer jacket. Curled at the bottom of the stone steps was a tiny, trembling figure. The girl didn't speak. She just stared at the flashlight beam as if it were a falling star, her chest heaving with a feverish rattle. Maria scrambled down, her heart hammering against her ribs.
She reached the figure and gasped. It was a girl, barely seven or eight years old. Her hair was a matted bird's nest, and her skin was the color of ash, pulled tight over sharp cheekbones. She was dressed in layers of coarse, filthy linen, a strange oversized rags that looked like something out of a history book, or a period drama, but the grime was far too real.
"Hey! Wake up!" Maria pressed her hand to the girl's forehead.
The heat was terrifying. A fever that felt like a physical burn.
The girl's eyes flickered open for a second—dull, glazed, and unfocused. She let out a tiny, broken whimper before her head rolled back.
Maria didn't think about the legality anymore, or the strangeness of how a child had gotten into a locked cellar. She only thought of her own younger brother back in Samosir. She scooped the girl up—she was horrifyingly light, like a bundle of dry sticks—and carried her into the house.
She laid the girl on her bed and stripped away the damp, ancient rags, wrapping her in a clean, oversized T-shirt. She sponged her down with cool water, forcing a crushed fever tablet mixed with water between her cracked lips.
As the minutes bled into an hour, the frantic rhythm of Maria's heart finally began to slow. She sat on the edge of her narrow bed, watching the small, fragile chest rise and fall. the deathly pallor began to recede. The paracetamol was doing its work; the violent shivering had smoothed out into a deep, restorative exhaustion.
Maria leaned back in her chair, the iron poker still leaning against the desk as a silent guardian. Her mind was a tangled mess.
'How?' The question echoed in the quiet room. The cellar was locked from the outside. There were no tunnels, no hidden doors.
'Is this a dream?' she wondered, rubbing her stinging eyes.
'Am I finally cracking under the pressure of the workshift?'
She thought of her mother's message, the tuition fees, and the tomorrow morning shift. Her life was already a delicate house of cards, and now she had plucked a literal ghost from the earth.
But then she looked at the girl's small hand clutching the edge of Maria's oversized T-shirt, a drowning person clinging to a liferaft.
Her eyelids growing impossibly heavy.
'Tomorrow, I'll have to find this girl parent's,'
The constant weight on her mind and body finally triumphed.
Maria's head dropped toward her chest, her chin resting against the side of the bed.
Under the desk lamp, the house fell into a deep, heavy silence, broken only by the rhythmic breathing of two strangers asleep seeking refuge from the cold.
Outside, the wind continued to howl, but the cellar hatch remained open, a dark mouth whispering secrets into the night.