The Revenge of Kali-Ra

by K. K. Beck

  “Thanks,” said Grandpa, receiving the proffered box and flinging it to one side without ever removing his eyes from the screen.

  Nick sighed, defeated. “What’s on TV?” he asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. It’s all a bunch of crap if you ask me. Just a lot of junk, that’s all there ever is.”

  Nick sat down next to the old man and figured he’d watch television for about half an hour, then clear out. It didn’t matter how long he stayed. His grandfather always barked the same thing when Nick rose to go. “What are you leaving for?”

  Grandpa appeared to be watching an afternoon talk show that featured a hostess with teeth that stuck out and a lot of lipstick. Nick was vaguely aware that her name was Sandy something, and that she dished up fluffy celebrity interviews and cooking demonstrations. Next to her on a sofa sat a famous actress, who was explaining that her new South Seas picture, Taboo, had originally been titled Cannibal, until focus-group research revealed that people thought it was a teen spatter flick.

  “That’s Nadia Wentworth, the movie star,” Nick explained to his grandfather.

  Since graduating summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota with a degree in philosophy, Nick had been working as assistant manager at an arts cinema near the campus and kept up on movies. Nadia Wentworth, he felt, was a barely adequate actress who managed, nevertheless, to make the camera love her. She also had lovely breasts, which he had seen displayed in all their glory in Primate!, the story of a crusading female ecology activist living topless among the sex-mad Bonobo apes who comes to grips with her own sexuality when a trim game warden tries to run the wildlife sanctuary his way.

  “Movie stars!” snorted Grandpa. “I don’t keep track of any of them. Nice pair of bazongas, though,” he added begrudgingly. Nadia was dressed a little provocatively for an afternoon show, in a black transparent chiffon blouse.

  Nick thought Nadia Wentworth was a lot less sexy when she was being herself. Instead of letting her head fall back with her signature wet-lipped, lust-glazed, panting look, the star was wearing stagy horn-rimmed glasses and sat hunched forward with a serious expression, stabbing the air with her hands to make points. She was now explaining earnestly how a monsoon encountered during the filming of Taboo, which had at first seemed like a real downer, had, in fact, been part of a divine, cosmic plan for her career. “You see, Sandy, if I hadn’t been trapped there on Boola Lau with nothing to do, I never would have found this absolutely fabulous book. Since then I’ve learned that Valerian Ricardo wrote a whole bunch of Kali-Ra books, and I’m reading them, and I’ve already got a scriptwriter doing a final polish.”

  “Kali-Ra,” repeated the hostess, apparently bemused.

  “I’m so glad you asked me about my next project. Kali-Ra is this fantastic goddess-type woman, way ahead of her time. She has, like, masses of slave followers helping her to take over the world. It’s powerful stuff and really deep. Valerian Ricardo must have really been an amazing guy.”

  “That gal is talking about Uncle Sid,” Grandpa announced.

  Nick was alarmed. The poor old guy was worse off than he’d thought. Now he was imaging that the screen he stared at all day was somehow hooked up with his early life. “What? No, Grandpa. You’re confused. That’s Nadia Wentworth. She’s a famous movie star.”

  “You don’t know a thing about it,” snorted Grandpa. “You never even knew Uncle Sid. Neither did I, for that matter.”

  Nadia removed the horn-rims and stuck an earpiece thoughtfully into her pouty mouth for a pensive moment. “Valerian Ricardo was really a great thinker,” she went on, clearly panicking the hostess by going off on a tangent. “What’s so exciting is the way he tells these great stories, but there’s a deeper level, a, like, philosophical thing about good and evil and how the universe isn’t always in balance. Kind of like the dark and light sides of the force, you know?”

  “The, um, George Lucas force thing?” Sandy suggested nervously.

  “Yeah, but not exactly. The cool thing about Valerian Ricardo is that he gets it that you need some evil in the world too, and that evil can be way cool.”

  “She’s talking about a crude form of Manichaeism,” said Nick.

  “She’s talking about Uncle Sid,” said Grandpa. “He called himself that stupid name. Valentine Ricardo or something swishy like that.”

  “He did?” Uncle Sid was a shadowy figure in the family’s past. All Nick knew was that jaws were clenched disapprovingly when his name came up, and that it was considered a blessing that he had left town never to return.

  “That’s right. Sid wrote those trashy Kali-Ra books. Mother wouldn’t let me read ’em. She said they weren’t suitable.”

  “I’ve been checking this all out,” Nadia went on. “Apparently, Ricardo was born on a farm in Minnesota, but as a young man, he studied occult science in the East.”

  “Ha!” said Grandpa. “Studied chiseling and vice right here in Minneapolis, that’s what he did as a young man. He was no damn good. Ended up like he deserved.”

  “So you’ll be playing this Dalai Lama character. Interesting,” Sandy said unconvincingly. She had apparently abandoned any attempt to control the interview.

  “Kali-Ra,” corrected Nadia with a finger held up in a schoolmistressy gesture at odds with the see-through blouse. “Kali-Ra, the Queen of Doom.”

  Grandpa snorted. “Uncle Sid made a lot of dough writing that trash. Ran around Europe, lived in the south of France, and never told anyone he came from Minnesota and that his real name was Sidney Gundersen.”

  “Really?” Nick was fascinated.

  “He was kind of a dope fiend or something, and always in trouble. Women and girls weren’t safe with him. Even when he was a kid he stole nickels and dimes from the Luther League missionary fund down at the church.”

  “Wow,” said Nick. Finally, Grandpa had something interesting to talk about. “Was he really famous? What were the books like?”

  “Say,” said Grandpa, his eye settling on the box of chocolate-covered cherries. “Look at that!” He seemed to have forgotten that Nick had brought a gift, and acted as if the candy had appeared miraculously. “You know what? These are my favorites.” He began tearing at the cellophane.

  “Tell me more about Uncle Sid,” said Nick.

  “Uncle Sid? I don’t know. Not much to say. Have one of these. They’re my favorites, you know.”

  Nick gave up asking about Uncle Sid. Maybe Grandpa would be in the mood to talk about it next time. That would be nice. As far as Nick could tell, in a family characterized by unremitting dullness, shadowy Uncle Sid had been the only interesting thing that had ever happened.

  CHAPTER III

  DR. PENDERGAST RECEIVES ASTOUNDING NEWS

  The first Glen Pendergast heard about the Kali-Ra movie was in the faculty lunchroom. Carl Beckman, a Henry James expert who liked to sneer at Glen’s scholarly interest in popular culture, rattled his newspaper and said, “It says here that Nadia Wentworth is a big fan of that Kali-Ra you’re so hot for. I thought you were the only person alive who knew or cared who that depraved sicko Valerian Ricardo was.” Beckman had taken it upon himself, out of what Glen could only assume was professional jealousy, to get his hands on and read a copy of Glen’s Ph.D. thesis on Valerian Ricardo.

  Glen tried not to let Beckman know how hurtful he could be. “Well,” he said, “I’m not surprised. I always felt that Ricardo’s work had potentially universal appeal. His themes speak to something deeply embedded in the culture.”

  Carl snorted, and said, “Yeah, stupidity,” then flung the Arts section at Glen and addressed his attention to Sports.

  Glen eagerly read the item, little more than a few lines in a showbiz column. Nadia Wentworth was producing and starring in a movie about Kali-Ra! He was thrilled. Maybe there was some way this project could enhance his career. After all, he, Glen Pendergast, was the greatest, the only, living authority on Valerian Ricardo and Kali-Ra, Queen of Doom. “This could be a good deve
lopment,” he murmured under his breath.

  Beckman had apparently heard him and shot him a contemptuous look over the top of the paper. “Absolutely,” he said. “Those cretins in Hollywood should stick to trash and leave poor Jane and Henry alone.” Carl was always out to get him, intimating that Glen’s boyish handsomeness was the only reason female students lined up eagerly for his office hours.

  Finishing his grilled cheese sandwich in wounded silence, Glen went back to his desk. The Kali website, he figured, would have the latest on the movie deal. He sat in front of his computer, clicked on Netscape, and tapped out www.kali.com.

  Dr. Glen Pendergast, associate professor of English and popular culture at Montana’s Badlands State College, may have specialized in one of popular literature’s more decadent writers, but he himself looked fresh and innocent. He had smooth skin, big blue eyes, and shiny brown hair receding just slightly at the temples.

  He was glad about this last fact. Otherwise, he would have looked even younger. At the age of thirty-one, Dr. Pendergast was often asked to show his ID when ordering a beer. He felt sure that his lack of career progress was connected to his youthful appearance. That and the fact that his book, The Whip Hand: Issues of Gender and Genre in the Work of Valerian Ricardo, had never been taken seriously in the academic world.

  If somebody like Camille Paglia had written it, he thought bitterly, it would have been a best-seller. No one cared what a white male had to say about images of erotically charged, powerful women in the popular consciousness. It was enough to make him give up on his latest project, a study of the fifties TV series Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.

  From what Glen could figure, Valerian Ricardo, though a best-seller in his day, currently had about fifteen fans across the country. This, apart from library sales, was the approximate number of copies The Whip Hand had sold. The fans were devoted, though, and one of them, a shy computer programmer from Milwaukee named Les, with whom Glen had corresponded occasionally, maintained this website. Sure enough, Les had managed to get a transcript of the Sandy Shipley interview and had posted it.

  Glen read it, feeling, as he often did, left out and neglected. There was Nadia Wentworth going on as if she’d discovered Valerian Ricardo, when actually he had. And now she would make a lot of money off it, and be even more famous, while he continued to rot away here in this crummy school for inbred descendants of pioneers too dim-witted to realize you can’t farm a desert. Still, Glen was glad Nadia Wentworth would be publicizing Kali-Ra. That could only enhance his reputation.

  And, he realized dreamily, he was glad she was going to play the part. He thought it was superb casting. Hadn’t he always imagined Kali-Ra’s breasts would look just like Nadia Wentworth’s, which he had so admired in Deep Body Rub, the story of a topless masseuse with a heart of gold who wins the heart and hand, not to mention other body parts, of a fabulously wealthy tycoon with stuffy parents?

  Sighing as the image of those breasts, round but perky, flashed upon his inward eye, Glen clicked onto the Kali-Ra chat room, which was abuzz with the news of the movie deal. Most of the fans were thrilled that the world would learn about Kali-Ra at last, although one contributor felt that “too many people would get involved and cheapen the whole thing.” Some speculated that their collections of old copies of the Valerian Ricardo books would increase in value. One regular contributor, who exhibited troubling signs of the sadism found in the books, ranted on about the blasphemy of any mere mortal portraying the divine Kali-Ra. He suggested that Nadia Wentworth should be bound tightly to the marble Pillar of Pain centrally located in the Temple of the Chosen with stout ropes biting into her soft flesh and lashed without mercy if she didn’t drop the project at once. Glen often wondered if this self-styled slave of Kali-Ra was the same creep who’d sent him those threatening letters when his book had appeared. Maybe he should have turned those letters over to some mental-health authorities, on the grounds that the writer was a danger to others.

  And then, Glen saw with a shudder, there was a message from Lila. God! Lila online!

  “I think those who appreciate Valerian’s work,” he read, and he could hear her imperious, genteel tones as if she were right in the room, “will appreciate that as Valerian’s widow, I must act. I have demanded a meeting with Miss Wentworth. As many of you know, I promised Valerian on his deathbed that I would make sure his work was presented properly and in the best possible taste without betraying its inner spirituality. I may need the help of you, his many fans. I am an old woman, but I still have fight left in me. With your help, I will prevail. We must not let the legacy of Valerian Ricardo fall into the wrong hands.”

  Lila was up to her old tricks. That deathbed-scene routine was pathetic! Valerian Ricardo certainly hadn’t died in bed, and she knew it. She’d never come clean about that.

  Still, Lila’s little screed gave Glen an idea. If she could get in touch with Nadia Wentworth, why couldn’t he? He rummaged in the box under his desk for a copy of his book. Too bad it was a dull-looking, scholarly volume. The Badlands State University Press didn’t run to splashy cover art. He opened it up to the title page and scrawled “To the woman born to play Kali-Ra, with best wishes from the author,” and signed it Glen W. Pendergast, Ph.D.

  CHAPTER IV

  THE FLAME OF KALI-RA

  Lila Ricardo sat across from Melanie in Nadia’s huge living room, perched on the edge of the sofa like a bird, a small, bony woman of about eighty with bright blue eyes and crudely penciled brows that gave her a startled expression. She was wearing nineteen-fifties Doris Day career-girl attire somewhat the worse for wear—a beige suit with what looked like a cigarette burn on one lapel, yellowed and chipped plastic pearls, white fabric gloves, grimy at the fingertips, and a blue pillbox hat with a crushed chunk of veiling tacked to the front. She should have looked pathetic, but Melanie thought she looked scary. There was a horrible confidence and power in those bright eyes.

  “It is so important that I convey to Miss Wentworth the importance of this project,” she said in precise, stagy tones.

  “Believe me, Miss Wentworth takes herself and her work very seriously,” Melanie replied.

  “It is a sacred trust,” Lila went on breathlessly. “Valerian Ricardo died in my arms, and I promised him that those same arms would carry the flame of Kali-Ra.”

  “Yes, I see,” said Melanie. Where the hell was Nadia? She was the one who’d wanted to meet the woman.

  “It was my privilege to be his consort,” continued Mrs. Ricardo. “The man was astounding. Such a fine mind, such sensitivity, such a fertile imagination.” She leaned forward and whispered hoarsely, “I feel his presence so often.” She cast a startled look over Melanie’s shoulder in the direction of the French doors. “He is with us now. In this very room!”

  “Really?” said Melanie. Should she get up and try to find Nadia? She didn’t want to leave the woman alone here. Melanie had noticed that upon entering the room, Lila Ricardo had scanned the whole place, her unsettling gaze resting greedily on various valuable knickknacks. Melanie could well imagine her popping the odd piece of crystal or silver into her capacious cracked vinyl purse if given a second or so.

  Lila cleared her throat. “I need to find out just what Miss Wentworth intends to do in this film. I must give my approval, you see. That is how Valerian wanted it.”

  “Mmm,” said Melanie. The Kali-Ra copyrights had expired. That was one of the few good things about this project. The original work was in the public domain.

  “What’s that dear?” Mrs. Ricardo was suddenly shouting.

  “I just said ‘Mmm,’” Melanie replied.

  “Not you,” she snapped, with a dismissive wave of her dirty white glove. “Valerian is sending me a telepathic communication. Be quiet. I must concentrate.”

  She threw her head back and stared up at the ceiling. “It’s coming. His mind is so powerful,” she muttered, then yelled, “Yes, dear, I’ll tell them! Yes, my angel!” Presumably the extra volume wa
s needed to get her message beyond the grave.

  Her head snapped back into a level position. “Valerian says I should be a consultant on the film. Twenty thousand a week, my own trailer, and my own director’s chair that says ‘Mrs. Ricardo’ on the back. And script approval too, of course.”

  Nadia walked into the room. She seemed slightly startled to see what looked like a genteel bag lady sitting on her sofa.

  “This is Mrs. Ricardo, who wrote you that letter,” prompted Melanie. Despite the fact that this meeting was right there in today’s schedule posted on the fridge, Nadia still looked blank, so Melanie added, “Valerian Ricardo’s widow.” She was tempted to add that the old boy himself was lurking around the French doors.

  Nadia’s face lit up and she rushed over to Lila. “It’s wonderful to meet you. I am such an admirer of your husband’s work.”

  Lila rose and put her hands on Nadia’s shoulders. “Let me look at you.”

  Nadia, used to being looked at by fans, smiled indulgently.

  Suddenly, Lila let out what sounded like a snort. “Ah, but you have the rawness of youth. How can you play a woman, a goddess, who is centuries old?” She allowed her hands to fall from Nadia’s shoulders.

  Nadia gave Lila Ricardo a look Melanie had last seen when her employer had chewed out Manuel, the gardener and pool man, for overchlorinating. Her eyes blazed, her nostrils flared, her lip curled. “I am an actress. I can be any age or I can be ageless. I was born to play this part. I am Kali-Ra!” She thumped her chest and stuck out her chin in a way that always reminded Melanie of old newsreels of Mussolini posturing on his balcony.

  Lila clasped her hands together and closed her eyes. “Yes! I see it now. You have the sacred power that some would call cruelty, but which Valerian learned from the Enlightened Ones was an essential part of the cosmic whole.” Her eyes opened again, and Melanie noted the maniacal light in them just before the old lady, apparently overcome, tottered and fell backward, the result being that she reassumed her sitting position on the sofa.