Nightmare Magazine, Issue 74 (November 2018)

by John Joseph Adams

  Already, the fire in my body was sputtering, calming down. It wasn’t the queen’s embrace, but it was something. When I closed my eyes, a fog rose and surrounded me, whispering me into a lull.

  • • • •

  By now, sahib, you must be wondering why I was still at the clinic with the good hakim; why I stayed for weeks and didn’t steal his medicines, his laudanum, or his money. After all, I had done nothing but steal, steal, steal for years since my boy died and my wife ran away with a shakarkandi vendor. Hubcaps, tin sheets, tools from a garage where I worked briefly, an old beggar’s wheelchair. You name it.

  Before I became a thief I used to work in a dispensary—a tiny roadside stall in Qila Gujjar Singh run by a compounder named Ram Lal. He mixed tonics for common illnesses. Occasionally, a certified government doctor would check in, but mostly Ram Lal was free to do as he pleased. He was a good compounder, even though he did not have a medical degree. He helped the locals and earned a good name for himself with his gentle manner and willingness to subsidize his prescriptions.

  I helped him run the dispensary. I attended seven grades before I dropped out of school, and could read labels written in English on pill bottles. My job was to grind pills with a mortar and pestle and wrap them in squares of newspaper to make medicinal puris. We did well and it was a good life. Until my son disappeared.

  I suppose being in a similar environment with Hakim Shafi brought back those memories. For years I lived in that park—scabies-infested, filthy, often hungry. I had grown addicted to the darkness, but I suppose I was ready for it to end when I overdosed. Shafi came along, saved me, and cleaned me up, and I guess I was just too tired of myself to rob him.

  I don’t know, maybe every heroinchi also wants one story with a happy ending.

  Shafi helped me through the next week. Quitting cold turkey was like being cooked on a spit. I ground my teeth, sometimes I writhed and screamed; but his tinctures helped. I suspect he could have done more, but I think he knew this was my battle and would only go so far in steering. The ship and its course were mine and mine alone.

  Like cures like, he’d said.

  • • • •

  On the seventh day, when I had more strength, Shafi showed me the terrariums.

  His clinic was located in Old Lahore. Squeezed between a shoemaker’s shop and a cloth merchant’s, it was more like Ram Lal’s dispensary than a real clinic. His patients came in lines of worn, sickly faces, most of them women and children. They crowded into the dingy waiting room up front where whorls of Quranic calligraphy draped the walls and the smell of formalin and bitter salts hung in the air.

  Once I had enough vigor to navigate past the front hall to the backyard, the fierce, sudden beauty of it shocked me. A statuary of ceramic children laughing and kneeling in the mud stood in the center of a lush zoysia grass patch. Creepers hung from trestles arrayed across carrot patches, weaving between the half-dozen mango and orange trees that circled the statuary. Exquisitely kept and trimmed, the yard smelled of citrus and honeysuckle.

  I whistled when Shafi told me he did the landscaping himself. “That’s hard work.”

  He nodded. “My wife helped me do it. She was a wonder.”

  “Was?”

  “Yes.”

  I turned to a row of empty glass tanks in a corner of the yard. “What are those?”

  “Terrariums.” He crouched and ran a hairy hand over them. Monsoon season was upon us, and night drizzle had left the glass shiny and clean. It twinkled in the afternoon light, slanting red shadows across the grass.

  “You kept snakes?”

  “My wife did. She was a herpetologist at the University of Punjab. Russell vipers, sand boas, Indian kraits, striped keelbacks—she kept them, fed them like babies.” He showed me cracks, little spiderwebs, in the glass. “This is where her cobras tried to bite us.”

  “What happened?” I said. Shafi yanked a tall weed poking its head from between the cages. We both knew I wasn’t asking about snakes.

  “I sold them,” he said. “Couldn’t bear to look at them anymore.”

  A thought hit me, a realization that must have shown in my face; when Shafi looked up, his eyes changed. He rose and went inside the house, his footsteps impressing upon the muddy banks of the flowerbeds, a trail leading into his past.

  I got up to follow, stopped, and went to the back wall. I bent down and fingered the human footprint under the windowsill. It was fresh and clear and a child’s. The toe prints were filled with rainwater.

  As I watched, a worm snaked its way out of a toe print and began wriggling madly in the rain pool.

  • • • •

  The girl in the picture was not Hakim Shafi’s daughter.

  It was his wife—his child bride.

  Shafi said nothing when I voiced my conclusion. I ran my fingers across the picture, across the large black eyes gazing out at the world, nose proud, chin firm and defiant. The girl, probably in her early twenties, sat sidelong, a half-smile covered by a hennaed hand. With the nose ring, her broad forehead and that chin, she reminded me of those desert women from Thal and Rajasthan who meander with their tribe across the wasteland, grazing cattle-stock.

  I said as much to Hakim. He flicked at the end of his nose. “Eighteen years ago, I was in Hyderabad for a relative’s funeral. I bought her from a band of gypsies who camped at the outskirts of the city. She was eight at the time.”

  “Eight.” I wasn’t shocked. I come from a family of moonshiners and shanty-dwellers, sahib. My father ran errands for a pimp most of his life. I knew how some old customs work. “You raised your wife,” I said to him.

  “Yes.”

  I stared at the picture. “Where is she now?”

  Hakim polished a row of bottles with a rag.

  “Why do you keep returning to the park?”

  His voice was low. “Maliha loved the park. She used to feed those stupid ducks at the pond. Loved their ugly dirt-colored feathers. She said they reminded her of the desert. I used to laugh at that.” He yanked out a drawer and removed a brown pouch, its top cinched by leather thongs. He tugged at the drawstring, removed a wrapped sheet of paper from it, withdrew a necklace strung with three large stones from the sheet. They were cracked and yellow. “These here are the bones of her childhood.”

  “What?”

  “Desert pearls. Sandstone baked by heat for years. Maliha didn’t remember much of her early life. Her parents were dead, which is why her tribe wanted to sell her to someone willing to take care of her. But she said she remembered her mother giving her these. Her Ma told her they had magical powers and would protect her from jinns.” He smiled. “My Maliha believed it ’til the day she disappeared.”

  “When’d she disappear?”

  “Two years ago.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  “You loved her?”

  It was a stupid question, sahib, I know, but asking it came so naturally, it surprised me. Maybe it was a bond of understanding between sinners. I could see his love for her nestled in the crowfeet around his eyes, I could see his entire life in those eyes: feeding her, clothing her, raising her, falling in love with her, sending her to college. But he had bought her with rupee. Her heart then—did he win it, or chain it with need?

  Hakim held the necklace. “Yes, I loved her.”

  “You didn’t have children?”

  “We were barren. I was.”

  “Why’d she run away?” I didn’t mean to say what I said next, but I said it, “A younger lover?”

  His fingers pressed the stones as if telling beads on a rosary. “She loved me. It might have been a mixed kind of love, but she did. I’ve always known that. She went away because she was looking for something. A dream. Something she heard when she was a child.” He brought the necklace close, until it brushed against his chin. “Many times, I thought she didn’t know what she was looking for, but she was a precocious girl—always had been—and I trusted he
r.”

  We were sitting at the table in the clinic’s little kitchenette. Hakim got up and poured us green tea from a boiling pot. The scent of it drifted between us, sweet, spectral, ephemeral.

  “Sometimes I can feel her in the house, breathe her perfume. She left this necklace behind, you know.”

  “And that has you convinced she’ll return?”

  Shafi sipped tea.

  “What was the dream she chased?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a little insane, if I’m to be honest.”

  “What was it?”

  He put the cup down, shook his head. “Not now. Another day, perhaps.”

  Sahib, you might wonder why was he telling me all this. Why a respectable man like him would open his heart to a stranger, a heroinchi? I wondered the same, so I asked him.

  He wrapped the necklace with the sheet and paper and placed it in the pouch. When he turned, his face was inscrutable. It comes out at last, I thought. No one is so good, so pious, so righteous they’ll pick up a dying needler from the garbage and take him home.

  “I want your help,” Hakim said. His gray eyes were feverish. “I want you to help me find my wife.”

  “How can I? I haven’t left that park in years.”

  “Maliha disappeared from that park. I know it in my gut.”

  I watched him. If his wife did visit her precious duck pond, I never saw her. Then again, in the darkness in which we thrived, she could have danced around us naked and we might have missed her.

  He persisted, “I want you to ask your friends. They won’t tell me anything, but they will tell you. Someone must have seen her.” His hand trembled and tea spilled on the table. He wiped it with his sleeve. “I’ve looked for her for two years now. I have talked to the police, and they’ve done nothing. They—” He stopped, clenched his fingers. “Will you ask your friends? Please?”

  I took another look at his face and I relented, sahib. God help me, I told him I would.

  There are days when I wonder if I should have refused, if I should have got up and left his clinic and walked away fast as I could. In the end, I didn’t. Not because he saved my life—I owe him no debt for that; he saved me to answer his own needs, I think—but because I had nothing to go back to. The world is big, yes, but I had my own ghosts chasing me, and if I left, they’d just catch up sooner. Also, Hakim’s love was naked and trembling, pinned to the wall. He was asking me to help him take it down, and I couldn’t refuse.

  I told him I’d ask around.

  • • • •

  When I began the inquiry, my friend Yasin—I believe I mentioned him before—directed me to some of the heroinchies who kept an eye out on the goings-on in the park. One of them told me that two years ago, around the time Hakim Shafi’s wife disappeared, the qawwals were in town.

  Every year, a band of musicians comes to Lahore Park to take part in a qawwali festival. They’re led by a maestro named Tariq Khan.

  Yasin has a stereo he salvaged from a junkyard. When he shot up, he would often listen to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, his head thrashing to the alaap and raagas. Occasionally I’d join him. Khan sahib’s love songs are great, but we especially adored those that lauded the merits of sin. And whenever the qawwals came to town, we tried to attend the free performances in the park square.

  I have never heard Tariq Khan sing, but legend says, when he was a young man, he was visited by the legendary Tansen in a dream and trained by him. That, at the peak of his prowess, Tariq Khan once set a dozen candles alight just with his singing.

  “I saw her twice,” said Yasin’s heroinchi confidante. “A young woman hovering around the maestro Tariq Khan. Lovely girl. Beautiful dark eyes.”

  When I prodded, his description of the girl matched Maliha’s. The coincidence was too big to ignore. I asked Yasin to talk to the festival organizers, and he returned and told me that after each performance in Lahore, the qawwals left for Panjnad in southern Punjab. Perhaps Hakim Shafi could learn more if he visited the area?

  I talked to Shafi.

  At first he was incredulous, then his eyes widened. “Ya Allah.” He wheeled and, ignoring my startled face, ran to his room and locked the door. I waited in the kitchenette for nearly an hour before he emerged.

  “I know where she is,” he said.

  “What? How?”

  Shafi wiped a callused hand across his pale face. His fingers were grimy. “Her family, her people—they were gypsy singers. They came from a lineage who were once known as ‘professional mourners’: Folks who’d come at the bidding of rich families to wail at funerals. To add glamor to their dead, so outsiders would think the departed was dearly beloved. Maliha would feel right at home with qawwals and their lyrical lamentations.” Shafi turned and stared out the window. “At first I thought she went looking for her people. But she wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t leave me for her folks. They sold her. She hated them for it. She’d never say it out loud—she wasn’t one for self-pity—but I knew it.” His forehead creased and he talked in a low voice, as if to himself, “No, she went looking for naag mani. That’s the only explanation.”

  “Naag Mani?”

  “She’s gone looking for her childhood.” Shafi turned his strange-colored eyes on me. Nightfall was at hand, behind him the window was darkening, and I thought I saw something pale and glistening peer in. Hakim coughed and threw something across the table.

  I looked down. It was his wife’s necklace with the three desert stones.

  “She’s gone to Panjnad,” Shafi said, “looking for the mythical serpent pearl.”

  [End of Part 1]

  ©2018 by Usman Malik.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Usman Malik is a Pakistani writer of strange stories resident in Florida. His work has appeared in several Year’s Best collections, won the British Fantasy and Bram Stoker awards, and been nominated for the Nebula. He likes running and occasional long hikes. You can find him on Twitter @usmantm.

  Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung [Part 2]

  Usman Malik | 7405 words

  This is how Hakim Shafi gave away his life: First, he closed his shop. Next, he sold his house.

  “What in the name of God are you doing?” I said.

  Shafi grinned. That grin raised the hackles on my neck, sahib. “Burning bridges,” he said.

  I looked at him closely. In the four weeks since I’d told him about the qawwals, he had shaved his thick mustache and lost ten kilos. He was always thin, but now he looked like a needler at the end of his days. His temples were wasted, the flesh of his face pulled taut across the blades of his bones. His eyes discomfited me the most: the gray in them swirled madly, like smoke from charred moths after they crash into candles and explode into flame. It was as if a light had flicked on inside Shafi’s head, bathing his body in an otherworldly glow whose secrets only he understood.

  To be honest, I was becoming rather afraid of this skeletal man, sahib. I decided it was time for me to return to my world, leave the clinic and run to the park—

  Which was when I discovered the true extent of the damage that motherfucker Mustafa, Yasin’s dealer, had wrought. We’d thought Mustafa had cut heroin deals with police stations only. Turned out he’d gone a lot further than that.

  He had swindled the Poison Men themselves.

  I don’t know who came up with that name. When the opium fields up north were razed, many folk lost a lot of money. Folk other than the militants, with connections outside the country. To whom many body bags in Lahore and Karachi were attributed.

  Mustafa had been heavily scrounging the white queen from these people. In his greed to set up a drug cartel in Lahore, he lied and told the Poison Men his clientele was the city’s elite; that we, the park heroinchies, were suppliers for children of bureaucrats and feudal lords. Cunningly, he plotted it all out so that we became the swindlers and betrayers.

  As they say, though, no one plots better than God. The Poison Men discovered that Mustafa was lying. He had been selli
ng the queen and its substrate masala to their direct competitors in the international market.

  Mustafa and his affiliates went missing.

  Five of my friends paid the price for their greed as well. Yasin was among them. Their bodies were found floating in the pond near the banyan trees in the park, throats cut from ear to ear, rusted needles jammed inside their penises. Their fish-nibbled fingers—what few were left—were trapped in tree roots.

  Word was that I was on their kill list as well. They were looking for me and a few others. We were condemned. Dead men walking.

  So . . . I resolved to stay missing. Hakim Shafi had made preparations to journey to the town of Uch, close to Panjnad, where, he had learned, the qawwals had gone. I begged to join him, and he was happy to have my company. He was expecting me to go with him all along, he said.

  • • • •

  At noon, we got off the train at Bahawalpur Station and Hakim rented a taxi that would take us to Uch—a three-hour road trip.

  On the way, he told me how he finally realized his wife’s destination.

  “When she was eleven or twelve, Maliha used to talk about a mythical stone. She called it naag mani, the serpent pearl. A precious stone gifted by the Serpent King, who rules the underworld, to his queen.”

  I stared at him. He didn’t look like he was joking. “And you think your wife went after this magic rock a snake gave his begum as a wedding present?”

  Hakim guffawed as if it were the funniest thing in the world. His eyes were too bright. “Why wouldn’t she?” He chewed at his lip. “Her people came from the desert. Her mother gave her that sandstone necklace and told her it would keep jinns away. There are stories of such stones in every culture. It hardly matters what I think. It’s her assumptions that have brought us here.”

  “Hakim sahib, that is insane. I thought she was an educated woman.”

  He lifted his chin and stroked his throat. “I have been thinking about this for a while, you know. In her mind, she probably came up with rational reasons to look for the stone. I believe she talked herself into looking for it. You’re still sniffing and shaking your head.” He reached into his pocket, brought out his wife’s necklace pouch, withdrew the wrapped necklace. He unfolded the sheet of paper. “I should have thought of it much sooner, but . . . this is a copy of a letter she wrote to a herpetologist in America.”