by Nick Mamatas
No answer. But desire grew in him even as he waited. If it was indeed her, it did him no good to waste the hours that remained. And if the act could not bring pleasure, Jagan would have no need to warn him that it must end.
“Wife,” he said instead, with a man’s proper tone of command. “Join me.”
She came. Her limbs were smooth and soft as he remembered them from the first night he possessed her, and her submission that of a long-married wife. The smell of ash surrounded him, and he burned on a pyre of lust until his flesh melted into hers.
By dawn, she was gone. Rajiv woke with a smile on his face, and stretched in the net of light that fell through the slivered gaps in the walls. She had been real and delightful: a woman, not a corpse.
He spent the day in a gush of fine spirits, going so far as to pat his eldest daughter on the head when she served him breakfast. He tended his field, spread goat-dung over hardened furrows and tore out the weeds that had rooted. At times he would pause, scoop the sweat from his brow, and stand idle for a moment, gazing in the direction of the graveyard.
That night and the next he lay awake, pondering each village girl in turn. He refused to think of Bela’s gentle compliance, her silence, the fire that burned him. But on occasion, he still fancied he heard the padding of feet through the room.
On the final night of the week he heard them clearly. He sat bolt upright and stared into the darkness.
No charred smell greeted him. Nothing moved. But Rajiv swung himself off the bed, pulled on his dhoti, and left the house.
A rough strip of bark he gathered from a mango tree. A barely-ripe fruit he tore from a branch, bit off the flesh and spat it out to leave only the kernel. Then he strode off to the graveyard.
He scratched at the palisade fence until a splinter dislodged. With its sharp point he scored his own skin, and scraped up the oozing blood.
What Jagan had added to the fourth corner, Rajiv could not guess. But he planted his offerings in the remaining three, muttering such snatches of verse as he could remember. Warm air plucked at his arms and legs, and the pile shifted slightly under his feet.
He knelt at the foot of the grave, and mumbled all the prayers he knew.
A flame shot from the grave. Rajiv flinched back, covered his face with his arms, heard a whimper issue from his numb lips.
When the blindness passed, he forced his eyes to open. Light cut them deep, but he managed to make out a figure in the centre of the flame. Featureless as the creature that had followed him home, but with the shape and size of a woman.
“Bela?”
She laughed, the most terrible sound he had ever heard.
“You wanted my soul.” Her voice clawed at him. “Don’t you like it? You prefer it trapped in a dead body, perhaps.”
She leaned towards him, her face lit by a savage glow. Rajiv scrambled away.
“Who are you?” he whispered. “What have you done with my wife?”
“I am your wife—or rather, I’m the soul of the woman who was your wife. Did you think what you saw in her was all there was to see? A servant, a chattel, a cushion for your blows?”
Rajiv winced. He remembered her expression the first time he struck her, eyes dark with fear and reproach.
“You were a good wife,” he protested.
“I learned to obey. To hide my feelings, to conceal who I truly was. You never wanted to know. Why do you call me now, if not to see the true nature of my soul, revealed without the mask of flesh?”
Rajiv sought for words. He wanted the old Bela, quiet, obedient; not this raging fire of spirit. Staring into its flaming eyes, he knew not how to speak his wish.
“Are you surprised?” Bela said. “You ought not to be. Did you not know that every woman has a soul that belongs to her alone?”
Rajiv swallowed.
“I thought you were happy,” he said. “You never told me you weren’t.”
“You never asked. If I had spoken, what would you have done?”
He knew the answer, though he could not bear to speak it. Not here beside her grave. Not now, facing her spirit for the first time.
“What will you do?” he whispered.
“I will leave you,” Bela said. “Because I can. The month is over, and you have no power to hold me back. But I wanted you to see the real me—just once.”
The flame vanished, leaving a blue scar in the night. Rajiv struggled for breath. Gradually he became aware of the grass crushed under his knees, of the scent of dew.
“You are a foolish man,” Jagan said from the darkness.
Rajiv started.
“How long have you been here?”
“I followed you. The calling is not safe without the fourth item, which I shall not tell you about. You tried to let loose an uncontained spirit into the world. That could have brought disaster on us all.”
Rajiv scuffled back. His limbs trembled.
“But I called her,” he said. “She came.”
“What you saw,” Jagan said, “was not Bela. It was a demon taking her shape in an attempt to trick you. Fortunately, I guessed you would act like this, and I prepared. Nothing can cross from the spirit world while my bars hold. But you must go now. Do not try this again. A man may call all sorts of evil to him when he is crazed with grief. As for the spirit of your wife, it has moved on. The time has passed.”
Rajiv lifted his head, and saw that the stars had fallen from midnight.
“What came,” he insisted, “was Bela’s true self. Why didn’t you show it to me before? Why did you give me a walking corpse?”
“What else did you want?”
Rajiv struggled for an answer.
“I gave you a compliant body,” Jagan said. “That is all a man wants from his wife, and all a woman can offer her husband. The rest is your own imagination.”
“I wanted more.”
“There is nothing more.”
Rajiv let himself be raised, and leaned on Jagan throughout the long stumble towards home.
“Keep to the rituals,” Jagan said. “You have placed yourself and your family in danger, but I have contained it. The creature you saw will not trouble you again. But there are others, and worse. Do not persist in calling them, or I will be forced to contain you, too.”
Rajiv stopped. They had almost reached Jagan’s house.
“How could you do that?”
A sliver of starlight cut across Jagan’s face, making it a grotesque mockery of his daytime self.
“I could take your soul,” he said. “And lock it away securely. The next time a man comes to me, pleading for one last meeting with his wife, I would use it.”
“How?”
Jagan patted his arm.
“Go home to your family. Observe the rituals, and look about for another girl to marry.” He turned into his own house, and left Rajiv alone in the street.
When Rajiv entered the hut, his mother and daughters lay like the dead, but the silence of their waking hummed like crickets. He stood for a moment in the darkness, feeling their presence as a reassurance, a promise that he would not come to harm.
“Sleep,” he said. “All is well.”
He lay down on his own bed, and strained to hear the sound of breathing through the partition wall.
No footsteps came. He craved them now, not as a satisfaction to himself, but as a sign that there might still be time. He wanted to undo the past, and create something better.
In the silence, he grieved. Not for himself, but for a woman he wished he had known.
M P Ericson has lived in Sweden, Trinidad, and Tanzania, but is now settled in the north of England. She holds a PhD in Philosophy, and has worked as a tutor, researcher, and accountant. Her short fiction has appeared in venues such as Abyss & Apex, Dred, and the Freehold: Southern Storm anthology from Carnifex Press.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Turn the Page, Press Return
A Light in Troy
304 Adolf Hitler Strasse
&
nbsp; The Moby Clitoris of His Beloved
Lydia’s Body
Urchins, While Swimming
The Other Amazon
Orm the Beautiful
Automatic
Chewing Up the Innocent
Attar of Roses
Clockmaker’s Requiem
Something in the Mermaid Way
The Third Bear
The First Female President
There’s No Light Between Floors
Qubit Conflicts
The Oracle Spoke
The Moon Over Yodok
I’ll Gnaw Your Bones, the Manticore Said
Transtexting Pose
The Taste of Wheat
The Beacon
The Ape’s Wife
Lost Soul
