Mortal Fear

by Greg Iles

  ERIN> In four years of college you never once fell in love?

  MAXWELL> Love? My mind was in chains! Whenever I thought I was making progress, another incident would occur. In medical school, seven other students and I were paraded into an operating room where an anesthetized young woman was about to be given a hysterectomy. We were to practice vaginal examinations, using her as our patient. This is common practice in teaching hospitals, if your husband hasn’t told you. As I stood in line, watching my fellow students force their gloved fingers into the pale, still body, I felt fury at the institutional violation of this defenseless woman. But then I sensed a terrific pressure beneath my lab coat. When my turn came to examine her, my hands were trembling. This was so out of character that the attending physician remarked on it. I bumbled through the exam, then raced into a restroom to relieve my distress. As I did, I visualized the anesthetized woman, the most perfect image I had yet encountered of my mother. I knew then that I was not yet free—that I might never be free—of her.

  ERIN> Your father never sensed your problems?

  MAXWELL> Of course he did! Richard blamed himself completely! For eulogizing my mother long after her death. For not having the courage to marry the woman he loved. If he had, he knew, he might have given me the gift he’d been granted—a sister with whom I could share all. Worse, by denying me that sister, he had also crippled the powerful gene line that had been concentrated in me. He begged me to turn outward, to search for someone who might fill the need he had not provided for, and give me heirs worthy of our genes.

  ERIN> Did you?

  MAXWELL> I tried. But I was meant to walk a different path, Erin. Summers during college, I began to travel abroad with my father. I had been to Europe, of course, but never to the East. And the East was Richard’s great passion. He was obsessed with the fertility cults of the Indus Valley cities, the bloody rituals of sex and death around which Indian culture had developed. He’d been raised by an authoritarian father, a paragon of the sky cult of Christianity, which of course had been grafted onto the sky cult of Germanic warrior culture. Yet he had seen his father break, and commit suicide under the stress of bad fortune. Richard sought a greater strength. Thus was he drawn to India, the great fount and faithful preserver of the Mother principle.

  In India my illusions were stripped away. The strong ruled, the weak served or perished. I found women there who would do anything I wished for pitiful sums. The fact that I would be miles away the next day allowed me to overcome my anxieties and couple with them, but always there was a problem. Indian women are dark of skin and hair. They did not fit my template, ethereal Catherine lying in her martyr’s coffin.

  Back in America, my sexual problems continued, but they did not interfere with my academic advancement. I was like a man aflame. Even as my genius was proclaimed from the heights, I was hiring prostitutes to lie passive in white gowns while I gently mounted them. I believe I was going slowly mad. Even those whores, who had seen so much depravity, were frightened by something in me. One lost her composure during the act and attacked me, and I had to be hospitalized for clotting factor therapy. Suicidal thoughts possessed me. It was then that Richard intervened. He stuffed me with amphetamines, whisked me off to India, and changed my life forever.

  ERIN> What was different about that trip?

  MAXWELL> I found someone.

  ERIN> A woman?

  MAXWELL> Yes.

  ERIN> Like your mother?

  MAXWELL> No. I found a woman who was death in life. Do you understand? Christianity preaches eternal life through death, but that is a false and exhausted dream. It is on the road of death that we find life eternal.

  Here we go, I say silently. Jesus Christ.

  ERIN> I’m not sure I understand.

  MAXWELL> You will. On that final trip to India, we crisscrossed the subcontinent in search of rituals and cults which had been outlawed by the British long before, but which rumor claimed still flourished in remote areas. Richard was no Western dilettante. He had friends all over the country, from the teeming cities to the villagedotted plains. At an isolated tribal village we were allowed to see a young boy dragged through the fields while a crowd of farmers hacked the flesh from his body in strips, which they then buried in their fields to ensure fertility.

  From there, we trekked to a high village where a certain Shakti cult was known to practice Tantrism of the Left Hand. Most Indian holy men practice asceticism as the route to what Westerners would call salvation. But Tantrics of the Left Hand Path are adepts. For them, self-denial brings pleasure. Their sacrament requires_breaking _each taboo in ritual fashion. No Westerner had ever witnessed these rites. Yet Richard, with the help of a guru, gained us admittance. At midnight in a cremation ground, eleven couples were seated in a circle. At their center sat a young woman, nude. There was chanting of mantras, then the woman was sprinkled with taboo substances such as meat and alcohol, which were shared by all. Then the remaining women removed their vests, which were placed by the guru in a box. Each man approached the box and selected a vest. His choice of vest determined the woman with whom he would couple during the ritual. As we stared from without the circle, the participants disrobed and began to copulate around us. No taboo of class or law was observed during this rite. If a man chose the vest of his sister, they made love as strangers, honoring the goddess by their rapture. For my father the experience was an epiphany, a validation of his life history. For me it was electrifying, the spiritual antithesis of a Roman orgy. It was holy sex. When the men and women around us finally began to allow themselves the release of orgasm—which we had believed forbidden—I realized that this journey was not like the others. Time was funneling in upon itself, sucking me toward some great reversal.

  Encouraged by our successes, we pushed farther into the interior. Our only protection in that hard land was our wits, our money, and the strength in our limbs. My father had a very bad time. Hemophilia deteriorates the joints, and Richard’s were failing fast. But like mad white hunters pursuing elephants in search of the mythical ivory graveyard, we trod endless miles of grass and rock in search of the one significant cult of which Richard had found no extant trace. The Thuggee.

  The Thugs were a robber caste which had flourished in India for centuries. They earned their livelihood by falling in with groups of travelers on the roads and then strangling them in their sleep. They stole all money and belongings, then expertly concealed the corpses. Nothing remarkable in that, of course. What made the Thuggee unique was that the murders they committed were part of their religion. They worshiped Kali—the goddess of death and destruction—in her many forms. Kali the Black One, the Betrayer, the Difficult of Approach. For them, murder was a sacrament, and the profit gained their rightful due. The British claimed to have wiped out the Thugs by the end of the nineteenth century, but my father believed no cult which had thrived for centuries could be utterly stamped out in one.

  He was right. After many weeks of following whispered directions bought too dearly and warnings shouted free of charge, we were admitted to the home of a man who confessed that Kali’s cult of murder still existed. After a sleepless night talking to Richard (during which a considerable amount of money changed hands) the man admitted that he himself worshiped Kali and had been trained in the ways of the Thugs. For my father it was the culmination of a life’s work. But as he greedily absorbed the most arcane of Eastern secrets, I was striking up a relationship of my own.

  The Thug had three daughters. Two chattered endlessly, but the middle daughter was silent. She was dark-skinned, of course, but also unutterably beautiful. She watched me wherever I went, and I watched her. On the third night she came to my pallet. It was the first consensual sex in my life with a woman who was not a whore. I did not have to speak. The first time she lay as motionless as the dead beneath me. The second, she rose above me like a black goddess and chanted words that cleft my mind like a scimitar: “Is Kali, my Divine Mother, of a black complexion? She appears black
from a distance, but when intimately known she is no longer so. Bondage and liberation are both of her making. She must always have her way.” In that instant this young girl smashed my spiritual chains and brought me to fierce, bursting climax. I was a man transformed.

  In the morning I was amazed to learn that this proud girl spoke English, which was rare in the province. She had been taught it as a way to lull travelers into feeling safe. For three nights she initiated me into wonders I had never imagined, or had been sickened by when I did. I saw that all my life had been an obsessive exercise in compensation. I had been born with an incurable disease, cursed with fragility. I’d watched my delicate mother perish for love, then sought a woman equal to her. But the daughter of the Thug was Catherine’s antithesis. Cold and hard outside, yet soft and fathomless at her core. I had feared unrestrained sex for so long. In my mind the “yoni”—the opening in the woman—was a crevice through which a man would fall back into the mindless black maw of Nature. The women who had wanted me sought to enslave me, to bear children unworthy of my line. But the daughter of the Thug allayed my fears. She taught me that semen, once ejaculated into the fire of the yoni, could still be arrested and returned. That I would not be dissolved into her but rather purge myself of earthly lust and touch the stars. She was Death rendered tangible in flesh.

  On the night before my father and I were to leave, I spoke out at the dinner table. In my best attempt at his dialect, I humbly asked the Thug for his daughter’s hand in marriage. He opened his stinking mouth and belly-laughed in my face. I was humiliated, blinded by rage and embarrassment. But of course Richard knew exactly what to do. With a bemused smile he removed a leather case from his robe, laid a thousand British pounds on the table, and told the fat man he wanted the girl for me. The Thug snapped up the money and agreed without demur. At first I did not understand. I thought some exorbitant fee for sex had been arranged. But just as I was about to make a fool of myself, the situation became clear. My father had bought the girl outright. Not for the night, but for life.

  ERIN> You mean like a _slave_?

  MAXWELL> Exactly. The Thug had sold his daughter for two thousand dollars. I had no idea how she would react to this arrangement, but when we departed the next morning, she fell in behind us with a cotton bag hanging from her hand.

  A fortnight later, waiting in the Delhi airport for the first leg of our flight home, my father collapsed. At fifty-five he had already outlived most hemophiliacs of his generation, and the strain of the journey had finally caused a terminal bleeding incident. I married the Thuggee’s daughter to gain her U.S. citizenship. At the ceremony I told an Indian magistrate that her name was Kali, and no one objected. Kali I have called her to this day. We watched over Richard as he died, then spread his ashes over the Ganges and took the next plane out of the country.

  This is my early life, Erin. The seed of my becoming. My strengths I have passed over in silence. Kali remains with me still, as my concubine. Understanding that I could never bear children by her, she allowed me to sterilize her. In this pure form she has purged the lust from my body, watched over me, held my subconscious at bay while assisting in my life’s work.

  How do you judge me, Erin?

  A dozen loose ends from Miles’s recitation of the EROS murder scenes begin clicking into place: the Indian hair; the possibly female bite mark; the postmortem rapes, brutal fallout from Brahma’s dead mother fixation; even Mrs. Lenz’s death, which must have been carried out by Kali while Brahma led the FBI around McLean with his cellular phone.

  MAXWELL> Are you there, Erin?

  ERIN> You lied to me, Max.

  MAXWELL> How did I lie?

  ERIN> You told me you’d never been married. But you married Kali. You’re still married to her.

  MAXWELL> Only as a convenience! To gain her entrance into the U.S.

  ERIN> It’s obviously more than that.

  MAXWELL> It was the only thing I could do under the circumstances. Just as you did when you married!

  ERIN> I know. Just don’t lie anymore, okay?

  In the silence that follows, I realize that I have put myself into a position where action is a necessity but options are few. No matter what my gut says, I have no guarantee that the tale of Richard and Kali and the rest is anything but the delusion of a madman. Brahma seems to be wrapped around “Erin’s” finger, but what is the value of that? He’s already proved that he can evade telephone traces. How can I use our strange relationship to stop him? Try the Lenz gambit? Set up a meeting and inform the FBI so that Hostage Rescue can try to ambush him? It sounds workable, until I factor the debacles in Dallas and McLean into the equation.

  Like it or not, I have only one trump card to play, and it was dealt by Miles Turner.

  The Trojan Horse.

  The 3.5-inch disk that contains it lies just to the right of my keyboard. Inside that black plastic, painstakingly woven into a graphic file that can be decompressed into the stunning photograph of Erin holding the chalice, are a few lines of code that Miles designed to stop Brahma as surely as a stake through the heart. I don’t know exactly how they can do that, but I don’t have to know. In matters digital I trust Miles absolutely.

  The risk of sending Brahma that photo of Erin—though theoretically almost nil—inflates a large and corrosive bubble beneath my diaphragm. But my choices are few. And the stakes have been life and death for a long time now.

  ERIN> Are you there, Max? Jesus, I didn’t realize the time. This is my husband’s afternoon off. He could get home any minute. I had a gift for you, something I thought you’d like. But I guess it will have to wait.

  MAXWELL> What is this gift you speak of?

  ERIN> A photograph of myself. For you. I told you I’d been looking for someone here. And I wanted to be ready if I found him. And you seem to think I have. What I told you is true. The truly transcendent aspect of my existence is my beauty. I know that. A famous writer once asked me a question he said I wouldn’t accept at face value, but one that was born from honest curiosity. The question was, What does it feel like to inhabit such a beautiful body? And the thing I tried to make him understand is that I don’t _inhabit _ my body. I AM my body. And I want to give that as a gift to you. As a beginning. I may not be as fair-skinned as your mother, but I know I’m fairer than your Indian girl. _Much_ fairer. Maybe I’m too vain, but right now it seems the only thing I can give you to match what you’ve given me.

  MAXWELL> How can you give this photograph to me?

  ERIN> I have it on a disk. In a special kind of file. A JPEG file.

  MAXWELL> You know how to encode and transmit a JPEG file?

  ERIN> I do now. A friend showed me how. She scanned my photo with a hand scanner. The quality of the image isn’t that great, but the photo itself I like. If you want to see it, we’ve got to do it right now, though, or else wait until at least tomorrow.

  MAXWELL> I wish very much to see it. Let me give you my e-mail address.

  ERIN> Can’t I just send it to Maxwell?

  MAXWELL> No. Send it to Q69@nowhere .hel.fi—do you have that?

  ERIN> I’m printing my screen. Where’s that? It’s not an EROS address.

  MAXWELL> It’s in Finland. I’ll get it, though.

  ERIN> Well, if you don’t, assume that my husband got home. Don’t try to contact me. No e-mail or anything. I’ll try again the next chance I get.

  MAXWELL> Perhaps tonight?

  ERIN> I doubt it. What you told me is a lot to absorb. You must know that.

  MAXWELL> I have faith in you.

  ERIN> Remember one thing, Max. I’m worthy of my Dark Prince. After you’ve seen my photograph, you’ll know that. The next question is, are you worthy of me?

  MAXWELL> You still have no idea whom you are talking to. You’re like the desert traveler who stooped to touch a glimmer of gold in the sand. When he tried to pick it up, he found it would not move. Only when tons of earth-moving equipment had been hauled in did he realize that he had touched the
finger of an enormous golden Buddha buried in the sand. That is what you have done today. You have touched the tip of my finger.

  ERIN> Good-bye, Max. Sweet dreams.

  Shaking with fatigue and excitement, I log out of the chat room and slide Miles’s Trojan Horse disk into the floppy drive. The instructions he left me are simple. First I open the EROS UUEncoder program and convert the .jpg file into a .uue file, which comes out to twenty-one pages of indecipherable text. Then I watch the file-status indicator changing slowly as the .uue file is transmitted to Finland as e-mail: 18% . . . 39% . . . 58% . . . 79% . . . 98% . . . then:MESSAGE SENT

  UPLOAD ADDITIONAL FILES?

  Y? N?

  I press N and stare at the glowing monitor until the bust of Nefertiti swirls into sight. My hands are still shaking. Standing slowly, I look into the tray of the LaserJet III. A neat stack of paper chronicles every unbelievable word Brahma spoke during the past hour. But does it matter? Very soon he will download Miles’s Trojan Horse. As images from his twisted tale tumble through my brain, a voice speaks from a still place inside me. It is Arthur Lenz’s voice, echoing the French phrase he uttered prematurely at the safe house in Virginia: commencement de la fin.

  The beginning of the end.

  Maybe now the words are true.

  Chapter 34

  I am highlighting passages from the Brahma printouts when the high-pitched ring that announces a satellite video linkup with EROS headquarters in New York chimes through the office. On the screen of the EROS computer, Nefertiti’s head evaporates, and the face of Jan Krislov materializes in its place. A small window opens near Jan’s left ear, giving a running status report of the video link.