A Blood of Killers Read online

  Before the boy could think to answer, the hilt of a dagger protruded from the back of the holy man’s neck.

  A young man, face almost hidden by long hair and a wild beard, sitting cross-legged a little further down the street, turned to look at the slain holy man. His gaze drilled into the corpse, until his bare knees, sticking out of the torn camouflage fatigues that were his only clothes, began shaking. One hand held the dog tags hanging from his neck, the other shielded his eyes as he searched the windows and roof line, the faces of the milling crowd around them. “They ain’t taking me back, no fucking way,” he whispered. He drew a liter bottle from a pocket in his fatigues and doused his hair and skin with its contents, then flicked a light on and set himself on fire.

  Another dagger appeared, this one sticking out of the young man’s throat, handle pointing up. Not Shishir’s mercy. He had none. Merely a signal to Mukul. The correct angle into his little niche hadn’t been found, yet. But they were closing in.

  The young man’s head fell back against the wall. His flaming hand let go of the dog tags, tapped weakly at the handle. Then he slumped to the side.

  Flesh blackened. The smell of cooking meat brought people out of the houses.

  His sleep looked sweet to Mukul.

  But he wasn’t ready to give in. Tired as he was, and so full of fear he’d never known he could carry so much and still live, the boy ran.

  A knife skipped across dirt, nipped at his heel. Drew blood.

  They were close, but he was fast. He’d run from their kind before. But then, he’d been running back to Jolly, and into Shishir’s protection. Now, he had nowhere to run. And even his legs would have to give out, sooner or later.

  Unless he really was a higher being’s avatar.

  He’d never had to think, except when he was around Sageenta. Mostly, thinking had been a distraction. Better to listen, follow instructions, and when things went wrong, let instinct take over. Jolly had always trusted that much in him.

  But with nowhere to run and death closing, Mukul did not want to return to the ghats where Jolly said he’d been found. He wasn’t ready. There were pressures, late in the night, that woke him from nightmares with a desperate sense of things that needed doing. And hungers he couldn’t name, or even imagine, that wormed their way through his head, invisibly turning the earth of his mind, demanding satisfaction. He wanted to live. Do what he’d been born to do. And serving Jolly could not have been his sole purpose in life.

  The Bridge. That’s where everything had gone wrong.

  Howrah Bridge. Rabindra Setu. The fifty-year-old marvel guides and foreigners always talked about, as if a way to cross water was a some kind of miracle. He’d met the contact on the left hand footpath, half way across, as the sun set and the brown water below captured what glory it could from light trickling through the smog to make itself sparkle. A thin man, tall, not unlike Shishir, but pale, blonde, sweating. He’d been wearing another season’s clothes, another country’s, really: thick, heavy fur, boots, leather pants. Mukul had spotted the obvious foreigner, spoken the phrase identifying him as the contact. The man had looked down at him, startled, checked over passersby and the stalled vehicle traffic. He’d looked at the city, floating, as if disconnected from the earth, in smoke. Said the words Mukul had given Jolly. Walked away.

  He hadn’t misheard. He understood English perfectly well. He’d let the stranger leave, and then he’d followed him.

  The man walked to Howrah station. The boy couldn’t lose him, even in the chaos of the monumental train station, with its herds of travelers migrating from trains, buses, ferries, taxis, rickshaws, and platforms choked with porters blowing whistles as if that was enough to break through the currents of flesh.

  Jolly had been waiting, but Mukul’s curiosity made him hesitate. Where did this man come from? Where was he going? How could he survive India the way he was clothed? There were all kinds of holy men, and mad men, and foreigners, in the city, but he’d never seen anything like the man stepping over the sleeping bodies of naked beggars to pass through a doorway, nearly invisible between columns, in the depths of shadow.

  He’d wanted to continue following. But there was Jolly. And Sangeeta’s frequent warnings about never, as his life depended on it, disappointing their benefactor. Her fate was the proof of her wisdom. “Too much education is bad for the soul,” he’d said at her funeral. “It makes one try to rise above one’s place.”

  Though he’d done what he was told, he’d still been the instrument of Jolly’s betrayal. But a stranger who was a puzzle and a question remained, and a doorway in Howrah station, and no one else to turn to, no place else to go.

  Mukul ran to the bridge, crossed it. Arrived at the station, the sound of steel wheels and rails grinding against each other rising over Calcutta’s noise like a flock of cranes.

  He found the doorway, slipped into its shadows.

  “You cannot enter,” said a man who appeared suddenly, shaped from the surrounding shadow, a storm of starless night coalescing from mere darkness. He was tall and wide, dressed in casual Western pants and pullover, both black.

  “There is a fee,” an Asian man added, separating himself from the mass of his partner, like one of Shishir’s blades at the moment the throwing wrist snaps. His charcoal suit made him seem like a new moon on the verge of manifesting into a terrible crescent.

  Both men wore sunglasses, and Mukul was glad he didn’t have to look into their eyes.

  He was afraid to even try biting either of them.

  He tried to say he had no money, that he was looking for a man dressed in furs and leather, and that he could be of service to them if only they’d place him under their protection. But his throat was dry and tight, and he could barely let out a squeak.

  “We’ll take him,” Shishir said. Jolly’s man and a half-dozen accomplices, from beggars to business men, sealed the way back.

  Mukul didn’t think. He dove between the legs of the larger man before him.

  He wasn’t surprised when the man caught him by his lupi, fingers clenching through the cloth, tightening its wrapping, pinching his groin, and frustrating his first instinct to slip out of the single piece of clothing he owned and running on, naked.

  He wasn’t surprised when one of Shishir’s daggers appeared in the man’s other hand, which he hadn’t seen move, like a silver needle sticking out of a melon. Blood seeped from between his captor’s fingers from the cut Shishir’s keen edges had made when caught in midair. The knife was gone an instant, not thrown back, merely tossed aside, in disdain.

  “There is always a charge,” the Asian man said.

  The fight unfolded with the inevitable certainty of a monsoon. The larger man drew Shishir and four others, forcing him to drop Mukul. The boy scrambled forward on his hands and knees. He hadn’t gone more than a few meters when two short screams cut the air. “Thank you,” the Asian man said.

  “We will wait,” said Shishir.

  The boy didn’t look back to see who either of them had been talking to. He crawled until shadows lightened and the railway station’s sounds faded, replaced by music he’d never heard, driven by rhythms and voices alien to his ears. The air freshened, as if an invisible hand had fanned Calcutta’s reek away, and a new set of scents swept in, human, sweaty but sweetened, lacking the fetor of city offal, and holding the promise of food.

  Mukul looked up to see someone step over him, on his way out. Heart racing, he opened his mouth to call out until he saw it was not the contact he’d met on the bridge.

  He dragged himself forward until a round-faced man, with a toothy grin, a sprig of hair decorating an otherwise bald pate, and eyes circular like a cartoon character’s and translucently pale, as if color had been leached out of them, helped him to stand on his feet.

  “Come with me,” the man said. “I’ll make sure you’re safe.” With an arm around Mukul’s shoulders, he led him through a room more opulent than anything the boy had ever seen outside of movies,
with marbled rose walls trimmed in gold and a polished black floor, brilliant chandeliers, and a long table crowded with so much food and drink that the cloud of aromas turned his stomach and brought tears, again, to his eyes. People laughed and danced and spoke quietly, huddled in two’s and three’s, and in corners touched each other the way he’d seen men and women do through windows or out in the street. Some touched in ways he’d never seen, and couldn’t imagine desiring.

  The man took Mukul through the sensory feast, so sweet and appetizing the boy felt corrupted in ways and in places Calcutta had never tried or reached. And then they stopped in a quiet place, and the man, scented like a garden, gently pushed Mukul down on a soft couch with a touch like a bird’s feather fluttering from the sky, and he stripped the cloth from the boy’s body, and caressed his skin and stroked his hair, and rolled him over on his stomach so that Mukul closed his eyes and remembered Sageenta and smiled.

  Until the man’s touch sent cold shivers up his spine.

  The boy whirled on the bed, found the man over him, naked, one foot up on the couch, his cock erect, scrotum swinging. The smile on his face was pure and simple, radiant with lust.

  The boy leapt at the man’s sacs and bit. The scream curled and wheeled through the air like a Black Eagle chasing prey, and ended in gurgling. Mukul pulled away, meat still in his mouth, which he spat out as a spray of warm blood gushed from a hole between the man’s legs and washed over his head and torso. The man collapsed, twitching, and the boy watched, wondering which would kill him first: the pain, poison, or loss of blood.

  At the room’s entry, a couple applauded before moving on.

  Mukul spat again, eager to get the taste of blood out of his mouth, thinking of the food he’d passed. But a part of him, so small he barely noticed it, liked the taste, relished the feel and texture of living meat in his mouth, craved for more. Though he’d killed men with his bite before, he’d never felt such pleasure in the act.

  The man’s genitals lay on the floor, small, horribly bloody, like something discarded by a butcher as unusable even by the starving. He’d never used teeth for a castration, before.

  The boy picked the meat up. Sniffed it. It didn’t smell so bad. Already cool in his hands, the sacs looked like tender morsels he might swallow whole. How many nights had he wished he’d had as much meat in a week as he had in his hand at that moment.

  Purushamedha. He remembered the word for human sacrifice.

  Going further along the road of death than he ever had before, the boy pushed the meat into his mouth. Bit down. It was tougher than he thought it would be, and rolled between his teeth, along his tongue. He had to hold the sacs between his fingers and pull, rip, tear. He chewed, though he knew animals just swallowed their prey.

  The man’s scream echoed in his mind. That voice was clear, vibrant, alive inside his skull, and he didn’t think he would ever forget it. It made the meat taste sweeter.

  Something inside him twisted. Burned, in his chest, throat, groin. He convulsed, nearly fell, thought he was going to vomit.

  Was this what women went through when they gave birth? he wondered.

  He ran from the room, and found himself lost in a maze of corridors, great halls and smaller chambers. Men and women let him go by, giving his naked body curious glances if they noticed him at all, but never stopping or questioning him. He found a steaming pool and dove in, washing away blood and filth. He couldn’t remember when he’d taken his last bath in a hot water.

  Once out, he followed the aroma of food until he found another room, smaller than the one by the entrance, filled with a variety of delicacies. He nibbled and tasted as much as he could, favoring powerful curries and spiced dishes, as if to cleanse his mouth, stomach and entrails. He spat out strong drink, but poured juices from fruit he had never tasted before down his parched throat.

  And then he was tired, so weary he couldn’t keep his eyes closed, and he found a corner of a darkened room and feel asleep.

  He didn’t know how long he lay passed out in the black pit of a dreamless sleep, or for how much of that time the robed, hooded figure had been sitting on its haunches in the opposing corner, facing him. But he felt rested, fresh, and strong, and he could run or bite, as the situation demanded.

  Dimly, he remembered he’d been looking for someone. A man. In furs. Because of Jolly.

  “You don’t seem to belong here,” the hooded figure said, in a voice between a man’s and a woman’s. “You don’t have a mark.”

  “Mark?”

  A hand with long fingers and, it seemed, too many joints, emerged from the robe’s sleeve and pointed its complement. A sign appeared on the parchment-crinkled skin between thumb and forefinger. “Painfreak’s mark.”

  “There was trouble getting in,” the boy said, suddenly afraid he was going to be thrown out. “I came in with someone. A man, in furs. Tall, thin. I don’t remember his name, but he promised—”

  “Please.” A face nearly appeared out of shadows beneath the figure’s hood. “I heard the scream. Followed you. Thought you were like me. I thought you wanted nothing, in this place where hunger reigns. But I see now, you do.” The figure rose, smoothly, like a puppet rising on strings.

  Air blew across the boy’s face, warm, steaming, carrying a fragrant scent, like jasmine tea, that brought back vague memories of comfort and protection. There’d been a woman, long ago. Her name eluded him.

  “Help me,” the boy said, and he thought it might have been the first time in his life he’d ever asked for anything.

  “What will you do with this man you’re looking for?”

  “Ask him why he lied,” he answered, not sure why that was important.

  The robed figure left, its hem trailing smoothly on the ground so there was no sign of feet, no hint of motion other than the stranger’s serene forward progress, like a barge floating on the river current.

  The boy sat with his back to the wall, knees to chest, and worked at remembering exactly who he was, and where, and why. He was in danger. That much was certain. Shishir. That was the name of the immediate threat. He waited, just outside. He worked for someone else. Jolly.

  But if he was looking for a man for Jolly, why did Shishir want to kill him? Details fluttered away, facts slipped from his grasp, and the work of trying to reclaim who he’d been felt like the hardest he’d ever done. He tired, and fell back asleep.

  When he woke, the robed figure was back. Stretched out on the ground before it, kissing a fold in the robe’s rough material, lay a man the boy recognized. He’d seen him, on a bridge. And the man had lied to him. Caused him trouble. Put him in danger.

  Rage exploded in his head, shot down through his chest and limbs. Before he knew he’d moved, he was on the man, tearing an ear off, sinking his teeth into the back of the neck until he scrapped bone, and then digging deeper to get at marrow. He spat out skin and ligament and muscle, then dove down again into the flailing mound of flesh, riding the wave of pain, rooting for nerves and organs that might seize and convulse from his poison.

  He didn’t know how long he savaged the man, but when he finally pulled away, his rage a gentle hum at the back of his thoughts, and strangely sated, as if he’d feasted on the entire contents of the first table of food he’d first seen in this place, the man had stopped moving. Once again, he couldn’t tell if his bite or the violence had killed his victim.

  Sucking on bone chips still in his mouth as if they were hard candy, he looked to the robed figure. Rage dried up and blew away in the stranger’s withering presence. For a second, he thought he heard himself mewl.

  “You forgot to ask him why.”

  The boy spat the chips out.

  The robe undulated, while its wearer’s shoulders and legs remained still. “You’re different from the others who come here. Not in the same way I am, but still different.”

  “What is this place?”

  “Do you want to learn?”

  “Is there a way out other than the w
ay I came in?”

  “Not for you.”

  With Shishir waiting outside, there was no other choice. “Then yes, I want to learn.”

  The robed figure knelt by the boy. Two women and a man looked into the room. The man stared at the corpse. One of the women asked if they could come in. The figure pulled down the hood slightly, turning away from the boy, revealing a part of itself to them. The three ran away.

  “First,” the figure said, “you must know you have come to a temple to appetite. Some consider it paradise, others hell. Its name is Painfreak, and it is a gathering place for men and women and their hungers. If that man betrayed you, or the ones outside, the act was a sacred one born from this place. Many hungers live here. Many desires. People come, to be satisfied, to be desired. Today, the door opens onto Calcutta. Tomorrow, Paris. The next, Peking. So all the world may satisfy itself.”

  The boy didn’t understand, but didn’t care. “What about you?” he asked. “What’s your name?”

  “I came here searching for my desire, which the world could not light. I never hungered or needed for anything, or anyone. Curiosity made me study seduction’s art, to see if I could inspire desire in others. But no one ever wanted me. Maybe I should have gone to a monastery, where my kind prosper. But curiosity wouldn’t let go. What would it be like to need? Or be needed? That’s a kind of hunger, I suppose. A pale one, in this temple. In all the time I’ve been here, I’ve never found the answer. Now I’m trapped in those questions, in this place, waiting to need or be needed, afraid to leave and carry with me an ache for a missing hunger, and the memory of starving in the excess of what might have satisfied it.”

  The boy wished the robed figure hadn’t talked for so long. “You didn’t tell me your name.”

  “Do you remember yours?”

  The boy couldn’t answer.

  “So we have that much in common.”

  “What’s the second thing I have to know?”

  “The time here is always now.”

  Again, the boy didn’t understand. “Are there more things?”

  “You’ll come to them. In time.”