by Paula Guran
It was cold, but there wasn’t a breath of wind. The snow fell through the narrow gap above the trail and between the trees, powdering the ground . . . the branches . . . everything. Even me. I wanted that white silence to stretch behind me and before me like a blank page. I stopped and felt it on my skin, breathed it into my lungs, held it there. And then I closed my eyes and imagined snow falling on the rooftop of that haunted house inside me.
The snow drifted before my mind’s eye – heavier, and heavier still – smothering the eaves, burying the whole place in silence . . . burying everything so very deep. And when I opened my eyes it stood before me, waiting there in a clearing. A house dusted in white, with an open door. The house was made of flesh and bone, and the bone gleamed brighter than any snow. The open doorway was a red patch, the door itself like a scarred slab of skin meant to cover an empty eye socket.
My brother stood in that red doorway, a shotgun in his hands. Russell’s face was smeared with blood, but he smiled when he saw me.
And then he howled.
Usman T. Malik feels his story, “In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro,” is “steeped in Lovecraftian influences. Ancient cosmic warfare, blood libations, hints of a world misaligned and warped – even as it surrounds the characters in the story, and irrupts into their puny lives as they struggle to understand it, and through it, perhaps themselves . . . this all strikes me as the essence of Lovecraftian horror. I intentionally stayed away from any of the Cthulhu Mythos to avoid pastiche; there are plenty of myths and legends in Indo-Pakistan that I could explore and subvert.”
Malik is a Pakistani writer resident in Florida. He reads Sufi poetry, likes long walks, and occasionally strums naats on the guitar. His fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award and won a Bram Stoker Award. His work has appeared in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, The Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Tor.com, and The Apex Book of World SF among other venues.
In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro
Usman T. Malik
——
Look for the ghost trees, memsaab, the college chowkidar had told Noor, grinning from ear to ear, and indeed the road to Mohenjo-Daro was lined with them. Rows of acacia, jand, and Indian lilac stood shrouded in clouds the color of steel filigree. Noor pressed her nose to the window, watching the treetops blur and disappear in the half-breathing ether. The November dawn was clear and without a hint of fog, but the strange gray clouds stretched amebic limbs in either direction mile upon mile as if the Sind riverbank was haunted by a limitless phantom coiling around the foliage. When the school bus sped past one such tree, the wind rush pulsed the specter until it filled with sunrise. Branches red-dark emerged in glistening veins.
Locust swarms, insect hordes, cotton candy – Noor’s brain groped for an explanation. Sunlight twitched in one of the cocooned trees and the illusion of giant blood corpuscles recurred. Noor’s vision misted; her temple sizzled. For a moment she feared the onset of a cluster headache. The last was two months ago just after she’d joined the cadet college and it had disabled her for two days. Now was not the time.
She stretched her neck from side to side, and flinched when Junaid touched her shoulder. The headache flared. Angrily she turned toward him. His starched white collar jutted into his neck. The striped red tie with the cadet college crest – crossed scimitars underlaid by pine boughs, surrounded by a half moon – looked uncomfortable, but he was beaming, brown eyes sharp and arrogant. He jabbed a stubby finger past her face.
“Spiders,” he said and widened his thin lips.
“Don’t touch me again,” Noor said, voice cold as glass. When he continued to grin, she looked to the roadside. White crab spiders – hundreds of them dangling in the gossamer mass blooming from the trees. Gently they swayed in the wind, milky beads studding the latticework – which she now realized was webbing.
“Have you seen any flies or mosquitoes since you came, Miss Hamdani?” Junaid’s hand rose crablike to sprawl on the headrest in front of her. “The locals told me this happened after all that flooding last year. Thousands of spiders took refuge in the trees.”
Out of the corner of her eye she watched him finger a strip of leather peeling off the seat. His nails were perfectly manicured. He tore off the strip, drew it into his mouth, and spoke around it, “Everyone was worried about malaria outbreaks. Guess the ghost trees took care of that,” and when Noor didn’t respond, “What? Don’t tell me you’re still angry.”
“I’m not,” she said sharply.
“Come now. It’s Eid. Let’s be festive and forgiving.” He was sitting next to her in a row three seats wide and his breath stirred the edge of her hijab. She edged closer to the window. He smiled and began to chew the leather strip. “Kids are watching. Have to be model teachers now, don’t we?”
Good point, asshole, she thought and closed her eyes. Another reason, other than his over-inflated ego, she’d spurned his advances since her arrival. Then again, this display of dickhood wasn’t limited to him. Many of the faculty – all male except for a quiet burkah-clad parttime lecturer, who disappeared as soon as her classes were over, and Tabinda who now sat left of Junaid in the third seat – took turns leering at her during morning assembly or talking down to her at lunch. Most were graduates of cadet colleges or military academies and had carried the attitude into their professional lives. That she taught English and not history or Islamiat hardened their stance for some reason.
Her students didn’t seem to care. Even though they were clearly not used to female teachers, her hijab gained her a bit of respect; something she’d seen frequently in this area. Part of the rural tradition, she supposed. Briefly she wondered how they would react if she whipped out Oxford jeans and long white shirts, her preferred dress back in her high school days in New Hampshire, instead of the plain shalwar kameez and dopatta she wore now.
She glanced at the boys. They’d set out raucous and excited at predawn, but the motion of the bus had lulled them and they were dozing in their seats. Twelve teenage cadets, heads back, eyes closed, athletic arms crossed over their chests or dangling off the armrest. Dara, the tall muscular kid with sharp green Pashtun eyes, was the only one awake and staring at her. She nodded to him. He raised his chin and looked away.
There’s another friend I made, Noor thought and covered the smile rising to her face with a hand.
About half past ten they entered Dokri. Junaid pointed out Cadet College Larkana to the boys as they passed it: a pink structure flanked by red brick wings and triangular arches opening onto the first- and second-floor classrooms. A cast iron gate blocked the driveway leading up to the school building.
“This is my alma mater. Hundreds of acres. Large grounds, lots of football and hockey fields,” Junaid announced. “We’ll stop here on the way back if you like.”
They left the town with its streets bustling with cloth merchants, laborers, and food vendors. Noor watched the last of the driver-hotels disappear in the distance and, as always when leaving a town, was filled with loneliness, an incomprehensible nostalgia she couldn’t displace no matter how hard she tried.
The feeling lasted until they stopped ten minutes later to fuel up at a small, peeling gas station, and the boys poured out to use the restroom and grab snacks from the mart. While Junaid and the bus driver chatted up the pump attendant, Noor slipped away. She stood behind a row of ghost cypresses and poplars along the riverbank and watched the smoke from her Marlboro Light spiral its way through the spider cocoon swaying above her. Dozens of insects hung dead or twitching in it. Hundreds of eyes glinted. If she reached out with her cigarette, could she set the whole thing ablaze?
“Quite a sight, isn’t it,” said a familiar voice.
Noor snuffed out the smoke on the bark of the nearest tree before turning. Tabinda leaned against a poplar, gazing thoughtfully at the water shining through gaps in the verdure.
“Cigarette?” Noor said. S
he’d never seen the professor smoke.
Tabinda smiled. She was a plump woman in her sixties with a bovine face and horn-rimmed glasses. Her teeth were rotten but her smile reached her eyes. “That shit you smoke? Nah.” She thrust a chubby hand at Noor as if offering to shake. “Look at my hand. Near the wrist. See where the two tendons join? It used to be easier to find when I was thinner, but can you see the dip in the skin?”
Noor looked at the concavity at the base of the woman’s thumb where it met the wrist. The skin was tinged orange, and paler compared to the dark brown surrounding it.
“That’s called the anatomical snuffbox.” Tabinda lowered her hand. “I used to snort real homegrown tobacco in my younger days, see? Place a pinch in there and snuff it right up. Quit about ten years ago when my doctor found a spot in my mouth. He took it out, biopsied it. Turned out it was pre-cancerous. And that was the end of that.” She nodded to herself and turned back to the river.
Noor watched the sun paint the woman’s cheek golden. They’d talked a few times before. Shared a few superficialities about families. Noor told her about her mother back in the U.S. and how long it had been since she had seen her; how difficult it was to live a translocated life. Tabinda told her about her marriage to a wife beater in Lahore and how she escaped by moving a thousand miles away to teach Pakistan Studies to this unruly military lot in Petaro. Commiserated about Noor’s transfer from Karachi to this “shit-hole town,” as she put it. She had a Punjabi accent and a nasal voice. Noor found it easy to like her; she was so jaded and sassy.
“Looking forward to exploring the ruins, Miss Hamadani?” said Tabinda.
“Noor, please.”
“Noor. Sorry. At my age it’s difficult to discard old habits. I’m used to calling all these men by last name.”
“Creates that distance, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. Distance can be quite useful in this place,” Tabinda said, her eyes invisible from sun glare in her spectacles.
“When did you start working here?”
“Oh, about fifteen years ago.”
“The faculty didn’t . . . make you feel unwelcome?”
“Of course they did. That’s what men do. But I also try not to get in their way.”
The rebuke was subtle but unmistakable. Noor stared between the moss-covered trunks at the bus across the road. “What they were doing – it was wrong.”
“Bloodshed and sacrifice is a way of life here. Has been for centuries.”
“They don’t know any better,” Noor said. “I can’t stand the sight of blood, but that wasn’t why I stepped in. Teach kids to enjoy violence and they’ll carry that lesson to the grave.”
Tabinda laughed. The sound was deep-throated and made her jowls jiggle. “Half these cadets will be dead before they hit thirty. That’s the nature of their game. In their hearts they know it and it makes them arrogant.” She turned and walked toward the bus. She was agile for her age. Her voice carried back: “This has always been a land of heroes and monsters, Miss Hamdani. Here you pick your battles.”
A soft wind soughed through the spider cloud, making the dead shudder. Insect dust pattered down on Noor’s shoulders. She brushed it away. You’re wrong, she wanted to say. This is exactly how it begins. Hand them a weapon and tell them to man up and that’s the way to the mother lode of horror.
But of course she said nothing.
She had come upon them by accident the day before during her morning walk. The boy’s name was Abar and he was holding the trussed goat down with his knees digging into its well-fed side. Two other boys Noor didn’t know joined him, each squatting to hold the goat’s legs firmly. The animal – one of the beautiful tall Rajanpur breed with spotted ears and a milky body – bleated and thwacked its head on the bleached summer grass under the Kikar acacia. The sight made Noor’s blood pound and she found herself stomping toward the trio.
“Hey,” she called across the football field. “What do you think you’re doing?”
The two newcomers flinched as boys will on hearing a teacher’s voice and looked up. Abar just smiled and jerked the goat’s head back by the ears.
“Sir Junaid’s orders,” he yelled and positioned the slaughter knife across the animal’s throat. The blade glinted silver. It threw a dancing shadow across the green and Noor’s vision rippled. For a moment she didn’t know where she was, and anger swept over her.
“Put that goddamn knife down. Now!” She was only ten feet away and her voice boomed in the narrow grove of trees dividing the football and hockey grounds. The newcomers dropped the goat’s legs and sprinted away, but Abar didn’t move. He pressed the animal’s head down, an ugly grimace of anger and effort on his face.
“What’s the matter, Miss Hamdani?” Junaid had materialized from behind the grove of trees. In his hands he held half a dozen steel skewers, a chopping knife, and a cutting block. Without taking his eyes off Noor, he set these next to the acacia and mopped his brow dramatically. “How can we help you on this fine Eid day?”
“Did you ask the boys to do this?”
“Do what?”
“Slaughter animals on their own?”
He lifted his eyebrows in mock surprise. “Yes.”
“Why? Where’s the butcher?”
“Sick. Off duty. Does it matter? It’s sunnah to slaughter your own animals, isn’t it?” He grinned at her. He had what her dad used to call a copstash mustache: a thick wad of hair that bristled at either end. With his crew cut hair it made him look like a thug.
“Tell me again what the Prophet said about teaching mercy.”
He pointed at the bleating goat. “That is mutton. You eat it every day—”
“I’m vegan!”
“—and today’s Eid. Someone has to slaughter the animal to commemorate Ibraham’s gratitude to God for sparing his son’s life. It could’ve been Ismael under that knife. Then we’d all be in a boatload of trouble sacrificing our sons and all, wouldn’t we? All I’m doing is teaching our glorious cadets to do it themselves. Very important, learning to steel your heart.”
She wanted to punch him. “They’re kids! They need to learn kindness before cruelty.”
His eyes were chips of hot mica. “Not my cadets. Not in these times. And this is not cruelty.” He placed the skewers crisscross on the wooden block. “It’s necessity.”
Helpless, Noor glanced at Abar. The boy was smiling, a cold twisting sneer that was frighteningly familiar. The feeling of unreality, of red-hot memory, resurged. Noor turned and strode away, blinking away the warmth in her eyes. Behind her rose the chant “In the name of God . . .” and the animal was screaming, a loud gargling sound. If she kept walking, Noor thought, she could outpace the sound. Walk away before steam rises from the animal’s throat in the winter air, before the red curtain drops in front of her eyes and the strange staring faces emerge . . . one of which will be Muneer’s. Always his.
As she fled, the sound was cut off suddenly.
Then there was chopping.
Through a thicket of trees they trundled into the low-lying areas of Mohenjo-Daro. The Sind River curled a blue finger around the plateau in the distance. Tabinda pointed out dull squat structures that formed the mounds on the ruins’ outskirts.
“Pariahs lived in some of these,” she said.
The museum at Mohenjo-Daro was a solid red brick building with life-sized bronze replicas of ancient relics flanking its entrance. Two hundred meters away in the desolate sprawl of the ruins the Buddhist stupa rose from the giant mound like a skin-colored tumor. Junaid and Tabinda disembarked to set up a picnic lunch, leaving Noor and the cadets to hurry into the museum.
“Had you come in spring,” said the curator, “it would’ve taken you eight hours to get here from the college. You chose wisely. But, still, this late?”
Noor fingered the seated Priest-King statuette the curator had been showing the class, a tiny resin replica with pressed lips, closed eyes, and a gouged nose. A crack ran down its forehead to the
left cheek. “Why? What happens in spring?”
The curator glanced at the wall clock. It was quarter past eleven. He scratched the crab-shaped mole on his cheek. “The Sarwar Fair. Hundreds of pilgrims from villages all over the Indus Valley converge on the saint’s tomb in the Baluchistan hills. They travel by foot and donkey carts and often clog up the roads all the way from Dadu to Sukkar. The soil of Sind is filled with miracles and magic.” His gaze didn’t leave the clock.
Noor placed the resin figure back on the counter. “What time does the museum close?”
The man sighed. He was short and swarthy, dressed in a checkered ajrak shirt, white shalwar, and an embroidered Sindi cap. His nametag said Farooq. As he looked at the mass of teenage boys loitering about the lobby, distaste crept into his face. “Now.”
“It’s not even noon.”
“It’s Eid. We’re usually closed for the holidays. I made an exception for the cadet college because I was told we’d be done by ten.”
“Oh.” She didn’t know what to say. They had been delayed at a military checkpoint in Dadu. Apparently a suicide blast had occurred at a small mosque in the outskirts of Khairpur, killing an elderly woman and her two grandchildren. The area was flooded by police and army personnel; checkpoints had been established at various junctures from Larkana all the way to their college at Petaro. The military was worried about a follow-up attack. Junaid said he wasn’t surprised. Most terrorist attacks happened in double strikes, a well-known MO used by the Taliban as well as the CIA (where they used drones for warfare).
“Sorry,” she said to Farooq who was fingering his mole, “but we traveled a long way for this. Most cadets go home during holidays, but they,” she pointed at the boys peering at a representation of the famous bronze Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-Daro and rows of clay urns lining the glass cases, “had no one to take them. Either their families are away or they have no families. So a few of us volunteered—”
