The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction

by Paula Guran

“Our first responsibility is to the students, don’t you think?” Tabinda said. “Besides, you wouldn’t leave two women alone with a dozen kids in this place, would you?”

  His fingers tugged at his mustache. The ends bristled. “I guess not.”

  “Good. We need to be calm and think this through.”

  “Don’t tell me to be calm. I am calm.”

  “Of course you are,” Tabinda said speaking each word slowly and Noor looked at her again. The professor had steel in her eyes. Her lips twitched when she smiled at Junaid. “Tell you what, see the citadel mound? It used to be a giant communal bath for the city. There’s a rocky grotto right below it. Good place for a fire pit. Why don’t you get it going there? I have chickpeas and nuts. We can roast ’em and tell ghost stories and pretend we’re on a camping trip.”

  Junaid’s eyes were riveted on Tabinda. The panic had left his face and that mean, arrogant look had returned. “Don’t be fucking condescending, you hear me?” He swiveled on his heel and stalked off toward the bus.

  Tabinda watched him go, then turned to Noor. Her cheeks were blanched, the facial droop more pronounced. “This is bad.”

  “Yes.”

  “This is very bad,” Tabinda said and licked her lips. “We shouldn’t be here after dusk.”

  Again that feeling, that sensation of her mind separating from her flesh and eddying down a dusty funnel. Noor’s head blazed, pain streaking through her like a dull saw. Dizzy and nauseated, she shot out a hand to clutch a nearby wall.

  “. . . okay?” Tabinda was saying.

  Noor leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. “I think so.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know.” She tried to control her breathing and it whistled down her throat. “I get cluster headaches sometimes. Maybe it’s my period triggering it.” She massaged her temples with both hands. Her right eye was beginning to water. “What’re we gonna tell the kids?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll think of something. Let’s go before they think the city ate us alive.”

  They trudged between the battered walls, corralling boys along the way. Noor noticed something odd: it felt as if there were more kids dashing, jumping, peering out from behind tall uneven walls and skidding through the dust than a mere dozen. Other tourists? She hadn’t seen any vehicles except for the site watchman’s Honda bike lolling on a rusty kickstand in the gravel lot. Certainly the two figures – so tall their heads brushed against the doorframe – who goggled at her from one of the houses then danced back into the gloom – were not their boys.

  She rubbed her watering eye and continued walking until they reached the bus. Junaid and the bus driver, Hamid, were talking. They fell silent when the cadets approached, but Noor didn’t miss the uneasiness in the driver’s face and the way he muttered when he thought no one was looking his way.

  “Is Hamid from around here?” she asked Tabinda as the kids settled around the heap of firewood.

  “The driver? Don’t know. Why?”

  “Just wondering. He didn’t seem too keen on staying here tonight.”

  “Tell him to join the club,” Tabinda said dryly. She was squatting next to the Pashtun boy, Dara, her back to the citadel’s eastern wall. The structure towered above them, its shadow pawing the network of alleys that branched and twisted into the city’s labyrinthine heart. They were shelling chickpeas and walnuts and tossing the husks inside a metal bowl. Dara had wandered over after Noor and Tabinda cleared broken masonry and stones from the excavated grotto and volunteered to help. He kept his eyes away from Noor’s, but she was glad to see him.

  She looked across the plateau toward the bus parked by a clump of rocks in the visitor lot and was startled to discover how dusk had whittled the day down to an unsettling purple. The shadows were long and jagged. She could hardly make out the driver carrying stacks of blankets from the bus. He and Junaid had roused the cadets into two wood scavenging teams, and they had piled acacia and poplar twigs crisscross with kindling on top. Noor doubted it would last more than a few hours, but it was better than nothing. Most boys had college sweaters on anyway – navy blue cardigans – and blankets would serve the rest. The remains of the picnic basket had been spread out. Kinnows and apples. Raw peanuts, walnuts, and channa chickpeas all ready to be roasted. Really they were all set to face the cold night.

  So why this uneasiness in her body? Her bones felt knobby and sharp against the stony ground, her limbs filled with tar.

  Junaid knelt down by them. “Is your phone working?” he said in a low voice.

  “What do you mean?” Tabinda said.

  “Is your damn phone working? I can’t reach Mahmud.”

  Tabinda flicked a peanut shell into the bowl and pulled her Nokia out. She peered at it, raised it high, and frowned. “That’s strange. I have no signal bars.”

  “Me neither. I can’t reach anyone.”

  “Weather, you think?”

  Junaid lifted a hand and rubbed his cheek. “It’s not raining and there’s no storm.”

  Tabinda’s eyes widened. “No!”

  Junaid nodded miserably.

  “What?” Noor said.

  Junaid looked at Dara, who was quietly peeling nuts, and got up. Noor understood. Rubbing her hands together, she rose and followed him until they were a safe distance away.

  “They blew up the signal towers,” Junaid said without preamble.

  Noor stared at him. “What?”

  Junaid bent his knee and placed a boot against the jagged edge of the house behind him. “Cellular base stations. The closest is in Dokri with a network of small booster towers along the way. I’ll bet you anything most of them are gone. Which means the fighting is closer than I thought.” He sagged a little. “We’re stuck here unless they send an air carrier. Or we can drive back.”

  “You’re suggesting it?”

  “No! We don’t know what’s going on out there. This place is safer at the moment.”

  Noor opened her mouth, closed it. Her gaze went to the vast, empty buildings towering above her. It was quite dark now, the sun just a blood smear on the horizon, and the houses of Mohenjo-Daro pressed together. Broken platforms poked and plunged unevenly; black and formless holes gaped in the walls. Above, an icteric moon sat distorted by a low cloudbank, its light not a promise, but mere possibility.

  “We’ve got to tell the kids now.”

  “Yes.”

  Noor shifted her weight; the icy evening wind cut through her kameez and woolen shawl. She shivered. Her abdomen tensed. She hadn’t begun bleeding yet, but she would soon.

  “Let’s get it over with,” she said.

  They returned to the bonfire. The cadets gathered around and listened to Junaid. Their faces were shocked and delighted by this new excitement. Spend the night in the ruins! Eagerly they asked how long the trouble would last.

  “I don’t know yet.” Junaid shook his head. “We’ll just have to be patient.”

  They left the boys chattering and walked to the bus where Hamid the bus driver was talking with the site watchman, a bald paunchy man with a pockmarked face. The watchman swept a hand toward the mounds and it triggered another round of debate between the two.

  “What’s going on?” Noor said.

  Hamid lifted his head. He was tall and very gangly, features chiseled and filed by many summers spent in this unforgiving land. He wore a khaddar chador around his shoulders in the fashion of northern Pashtuns. He stared at Noor through narrowed, kohl-lined eyes, then turned to Junaid and spoke rapidly in Sindi.

  “What’s he saying?”

  Junaid pressed his hands together. Slowly he began to crack his knuckles. “He says the watchman wants us to leave. He’s leaving as well and won’t be back for three days.”

  The museum curator was right. The locals didn’t linger here on . . . what had Farooq said? The Day of the Goat. Noor looked at Tabinda who was studying the darkening sky.

  “Why?”

  “Superstiti
on. They don’t like this place at night.”

  The watchman muttered something and even in the moonlight Noor saw color drain from the bus driver’s face. He whispered to Junaid who spoke back angrily. Two cadets who’d followed them here giggled.

  “Chario Hamid. Geedi Hamid,” they cried.

  Noor knew geedi. They were calling him a coward. Hamid turned and yelled at them and they laughed and ambled away. Noor didn’t like the sound of that laughter; it had a tinge of hysteria about it. Hamid and the watchman stood together, shoulder to shoulder, their faces stubborn and scared.

  “Maryal suyyji waya ahein ayyh raat,” said the watchman. Hamid flinched and began to murmur what sounded like a prayer.

  “Will you please tell me what they’re saying?” Noor hissed at Junaid.

  “Rubbish.” He pulled out his cellphone and looked at the corner of the screen and grimaced. “The dead swell here tonight,” he muttered. “What fucking nonsense.”

  The cold was making Noor’s skin tingle. She glanced at Tabinda. She was looking away from the confrontation at the rows of dilapidated buildings ancient and silent on the plateau. Hamid said something and Junaid snapped at him. The driver threw up his hands. The watchman closed his fist and flung all his fingers out at Junaid, a gesture Noor understood without need for translation: go to hell. Then he turned and disappeared behind the mounds.

  Hamid glared at the three of them, spat something out in Sindi and climbed into the bus. He turned the key and began to rev the accelerator.

  “Is he leaving?” Noor said, alarmed.

  Junaid’s face was furious and helpless. “Yes. He’ll leave without us if we don’t go now. We’ve got to gather everyone.”

  The fire was guttering out when they got back to the boys. Burning wood crackled and orange flames edged with black turned the cadets’ faces sly and shadowy when Junaid announced they were leaving.

  “We can’t go yet,” said one in a gruff voice, a freckled rat-faced boy named Tabrez whom Noor recognized as part of Abar’s posse. “We need to wait.”

  “What do you mean?” Junaid said sharply. “Wait for whom?”

  The boy popped a handful of roasted chickpeas into his mouth. Crunched them. “They said they had read about a secret room in the ruins. Went treasure hunting . . . Abar and Raheem.” Seeing Junaid’s aghast expression, he smiled sweetly and added: “Don’t worry. They have torches and shovels.”

  A mile from the city proper, in a narrow ditch between two rocks, Noor undid her nala string, lowered the shalwar, and squatted. She put a hand between her legs, brought it out, and, stared at the viscous stain glisten in the flashlight’s glow.

  Blood.

  The smell was stronger than usual. Fishy. Perhaps it was the air down here. She wiped her hand carefully on the rock, leaving a handprint with beetles squirming in the digits, and let the flow abate. She finished up with paper napkins and bottled water, then rose and stood watching the dot of fire amidst the mounds, one finger scratching beneath her hijab.

  She had shown Dara her scars, the raw pink-white ridges coiling serpentine around her collarbone and left shoulder. The thought filled her with amazement at her own daring. She’d never shown them to anyone, not even cheery, gentle Mark with whom she spent one night in Hanover before she left for Pakistan. Her lawyer had appealed for repatriation and to everyone’s surprise – most of all, her own – succeeded. She supposed it made sense. She’d never been charged and couldn’t just be guilty by association. Regardless, it was a frightening time, the last of her teenage years.

  Mark. God, she hadn’t thought about him in a decade, although in the beginning he was all Noor could think about. They had met at rehab soon after they released her. She was required to attend weekly sessions while arrangements were made. Mark was bipolar. Noor was benighted by despair. Terrified of what her past held and what the future might bring. They had made love in darkness, his lips pressed to her neck, the comforting smells of his hair and his body and his seed caustic to her senses; and if he noticed the roughness of her flesh or was dismayed by how she sobbed afterwards, clutched her clothes, and fled never to return, well, he did not call to ask about it.

  The night wind gusted, making Noor shiver. She patted her hijab, tucked her kameez into place, and walked back to rejoin the group huddling by the fire.

  Junaid crouched on his haunches. He held a lighter in one hand and a newspaper roll in the other. He clicked the wheel and a flame sprouted between his fingers. A red-hot tongue of fire whooshed to life and began to devour the paper.

  “Did you find them?” Noor said.

  He shook his head. “It’s a big place. They could be hiding anywhere. Although, when I do,” he gritted his teeth, thrust the burning roll into the dwindling flames, and stirred the cinders with a twig. “I’ll beat them to a pulp, I swear.” The fire shuddered in his eyes.

  They had reached a compromise with Hamid: he would leave the bus behind, in case it turned freezing cold, and hitch a ride with the watchman to Baner, the nearest town. There, he’d try to contact and update Colonel Mahmud on their situation as well as find out details of the confrontation between the military and the militants.

  “I really wish you would all come with me,” he had told Junaid in Sindi before hopping on the bike, but that was impossible. Abar and Raheem were still missing.

  “Mr. Junaid,” one of the cadets said. “May we have some more sheermal? We’re hungry.”

  “In a bit,” he said, then whispered to Tabinda, “How much food is left?”

  “Another meal. Maybe two if we’re stingy. We didn’t prepare for this.” She raised her palms to the fire, then shouted, “Who wants to tell ghost stories?”

  “Me,” called someone, and another muttered, “Dork.”

  They told stories. Gathered around the flames, ignoring the thrumming black, cold licking their flesh, they gushed out tall tales that became stranger and stranger:

  A silent ugly schoolboy bullied by his classmates is wrestled and stripped and thrown to the ground. He turns into a horned beetle, burrows into the earth. Returns night after night as a monstrous insect with a boy’s face peering into his tormentors’ windows, tapping and chirping, until they go mad from lack of sleep.

  A man on a lonely mountain road comes upon a goat, decides to steal it and carry it home – only to find the animal growing heavy on his back, its limbs elongating, cleft hooves dropping until they dangle an inch above the ground. The thief throws the animal off and flees, and monstrous laughter chases him all the way home.

  The soot-covered raven man flitting from tree to tree in a Hindu cremation ground.

  The pregnant woman in the bushes with snake tresses and backward feet.

  A knot of wood exploded in the fire and an ember landed between Noor’s legs, startling her. She toed it out with her sneaker, shook the stiffness from her back. She opened her mouth to ask if anyone wanted another blanket. “I know a good one,” she said instead, and blinked with surprise.

  They turned, fire-lit faces pale and somber. Eyes rheumy from smoke and ash stared at her.

  “My mother was a teacher at an Ashkenazi Jewish center in America,” she said. Her pulse was pounding in her throat. “She told me the story of the Sent Goat. It scared me witless as a child. Have you heard it?”

  They shook their head.

  “In the old days, the Israelites performed a rite called the se’ir mishtale’ach on the Day of Atonement. Two goats were selected in a ceremony. Healthy, unblemished specimens. Lots were drawn over them: on one was written ‘Lord’, on the other ‘Azazel.’ The goat whose lot drew ‘Lord’ was slaughtered immediately as redemption for the nation’s crimes that year. The other . . .” She looked around the campfire, at their reddened, glassy eyes and quivering mouths. “Anyone know what Azazel means?”

  “Yes,” Tabinda murmured. She was sitting next to Noor, her hands knotted together in her lap. “A demon of the wilderness.”

  “That’s correct.” Noor no
dded. “The second goat was sent into the desert, supposedly laden with the sins of Israel, to Azazel the wild demon, the pagan god, waiting to devour it. Azazel also translates as ‘the goat that departs.’ The word scapegoat in English comes from that.” She smiled bitterly. “The animal sacrifice and exile were symbolic of what might happen to an unrepentant tribesman. This was how they made themselves feel better.”

  The cadets’ faces were masks dappled orange and black. They watched Noor with unflinching eyes. The freckled boy, Tabrez, leaned and whispered in his neighbor’s ear and they both giggled.

  “That’s a horrible story,” Junaid said. His teeth gleamed in the firelight like a serrated knife. “I didn’t know you were so twisted, Miss Hamadani.”

  He wet his lips and grinned. His hand moved slowly to his lap. Was he turned on? Oddly she didn’t feel repulsed, just frigid and tired, and grateful when Dara got up and brought more tinder.

  Tabrez whined for dinner and Tabinda handed out four foil-wrapped packets of sheermal. They disappeared quickly. Someone wondered why Abar and Raheem weren’t back; perhaps a small group could go look for them in the ruins. Tabinda said “No!” so forcefully it startled them into silence.

  Junaid stared at her and said he was sure they’d be back when they got hungry.

  The fire whooshed and retreated from the night and Junaid and Dara piled on more wood. A couple of cadets laid out their blankets on the ground near the fire. Before they could start settling in, from beyond the looming citadel came scraping sounds. Pebbles rolled.

  Someone was walking the dark near the Buddhist stupa.

  They all glanced up. Just a black sky crinkled with a faint yellow moon. In the distance a door swung open on screeching hinges. A shout and a crash.

  “Abar,” yelled Junaid, springing to his feet. “Is that you?”

  One of the cadets screamed and shrank back from a night-thickened alley twenty feet away from which a tall figure jutted its shadowed face. It spasmed briefly, rotating its arms laden with glinting glass bangles above its head, and vanished. The pounding of boots on stony ground. In the ruins someone laughed. The sound was shrill and intermittent, more birdlike than human, and masked the running footsteps until they faded. Junaid shouted the boys’ names and plunged into the dark beyond the fire, the halo from his flashlight jittering up and down the streets.