Nightmare Magazine, Issue 74 (November 2018)

by John Joseph Adams

  I turned away. It had been months since I’d had anything to do with the white queen, but still the vision of that needle dimpling and piercing his skin left me shaky. My head pounded with the tabla beat, my flesh bunched up in gooseflesh. Men laughed. Someone thrust a cup of bhang into my head. Another clapped my back, whispering. I chugged the liquid. The crowd spun, the sky wheeled, and I glimpsed Hakim. He was slipping through a knot of hard-faced white-turbaned laborers at the back of the crowd. I weaved my way after him, ignoring the listless mutterings in Saraiki and Punjabi. By the time I reached the laborers, Hakim was gone.

  I don’t know how long I looked. Could have been hours or minutes. The smell of bhang, cannabis, and the white queen wrapped around me. The migrainous music swelled and abated, the dancers danced, the colors of the evening changed. My heart fluttered, and little pale children flitted between the legs of the surging audience.

  At some point I stumbled from the grasping hands of the multitude to a narrow, uneven gravel path twisting through the shrine’s outer towers. Night deepened and shadows swiveled, pirouetting to the drumbeat, and I found myself in front of an arched postern door.

  A large padlock hung open from its latch like a broken jaw. I gazed at it. The keyhole stirred. A black threadlike snake nosed its head out, slithered down the door, and disappeared into the gravel. I pushed the door open. Beyond was a black gullet softened by gleams of distant green light.

  I went in.

  • • • •

  The corridor meandered. It came at me with drunken angles, or perhaps I was drunk with the bhang from the mehfil. The qawwali music receded and a strained silence took its place. I lurched toward the green light’s source in this unnerving quiet. Even the earth dreams and murmurs in its sleep, but here I was benighted by the claustrophobic endlessness of that corridor jolting, tilting, and looping back on itself.

  A burst of emerald light drew me out into a vast space. I sensed it more than saw, because my eyes had closed. I blinked rapidly and slitted them. Acid-green flickered in the periphery of my vision. The stone floor felt uneven. The dip and rise of the high ceiling, the damp feel of the granite wall I ran my hand across—this was a natural chamber of some sort. Perhaps a cavern under the shrine.

  Again I blinked against the pulsing light, a verdant web that receded and expanded with my breathing. Something moved in the web’s center. I raised a hand and plunged forward. The source of the light materialized: It was the top of a large marble slab. A gravestone.

  Hakim Shafi loomed over it.

  He stood by the grave. His shirt was torn, the rosewood box lay discarded at his feet. He had his back to me, a scarecrow’s relief in the green light, as the portly maestro Tariq Khan leaned and whispered in his ears.

  I stopped. The maestro didn’t turn to look at me. His thick lips puckered like fat slugs near Hakim’s earlobes, his chubby fingers gripping Hakim’s wrist. A strange humming came from him.

  Something was clearly, horribly wrong here. But my legs wouldn’t move. Maybe it was the bhang, maybe terror—a bristle that migrated up and down my flesh. My feet were magnetized to the rough stone floor. I leaned forward, straining to hear what the maestro murmured to Hakim, and found that he was singing.

  Sahib, I swear on my mother’s grave, I have never been more horrified, more enthralled in my life. The paunchy qawwal’s stomach heaved in jellylike movements as he whisper-sang strange tunes into Hakim Shafi’s ears. Melodies jerked and slithered in swift tenor across the thrashing web of light. A gurgling song made entirely from vowels, a deep vibrato alaap that lunged and rose and pitched, as if the maestro intended to gut the cavern walls.

  I put out my arms, intending to run and shove Tariq Khan’s massive bulk off my friend. Before I could move, the maestro dropped Shafi’s wrist and withdrew his lips from his ears. Shafi shuddered and let out a sigh.

  The maestro threw his head back and began to sing at the ceiling.

  The emerald light blazed. A torrential luminescence that spun in circles and fIooded my vision. The gravestone was shaking and the light source shook with it, throwing juddering shadows of the two men across the ground, stretching them like tar. Hakim shook, as if in the throes of a seizure, then turned around, smacking his lips. His tongue drifted out and receded. His gray eyes shone like moonstones. “My darling,” I thought he said. In the inhuman wails from Tariq Khan I couldn’t be sure. The maestro sang and stepped back, sang and back-trotted, until he stood at the far end of the cavern, his woeful music lapping across the stony distance. It made my head pound, turned my blood viscous.

  Something shimmered at Hakim’s feet. A child. No, a woman, with hair like moonbeams, crouching. She rose and stood silently as Hakim gazed at her in awe, at the clearness of her marble skin, the perfection of her nose, her softly moving lips. She smiled at him and drew herself tall and Hakim grinned back. She reached, plucked the glowing stone from the grave slab, and placed it on her forehead where it shone, the brightest star there ever was. She whispered. The sound was like insects rubbing their legs together, or lonely reeds sighing on cold alien shores, or hundreds of serpents—

  “You could have just asked me to join you. Why make me suffer?” Hakim said, and laughed heartily at the intensified buzzing that came from her. Did he think she was his wife? In the throbbing light, the woman’s features blurred, softened, became a child’s, and for a moment they were so terribly familiar that sweat broke out on my forehead.

  Carefully, I retreated into the dark. The woman’s hissing came again, loud and clear, and I realized I could understand it. Words were buried inside its peculiar cadence. Rhythmical words, like a monstrous lullaby, or a soothing self-annihilating qawwali.

  Tariq Khan was gone. Sometime between the woman’s apparition and her whispering, the maestro’s song had stopped. The cavern was quiet, except when she murmured; her bone-white hands rose and settled on Shafi’s shoulders, drawing him close, and she was taller than he now.

  “Anything for you, my love,” Shafi was saying, his arms encircling her waist even as she lowered her face to his, her pale skin glistening in the light. Drool fell from the corner of her mouth, snaked down Shafi’s cheeks, inflaming them. Hakim grinned wider and licked his lips. “Anything,” he said.

  She wrapped herself around him, her arms, then legs, rising and coiling. Her weight staggered him for a moment, but he recovered and stood swaying as she hung from him, a giant spider, or a leech planted on his flesh. Her eyes burned, her lips never stopped moving. The light cascaded around their conjoined bodies, and I thought of giant cobras in sprawling fields playing with fireflies.

  I must have cried out, for she lifted her head and gazed at me. Her eyes were green, like squeezed summer grass. Like strange planets roaming across a vast black cosmos reflecting light from dying suns. Like the sparkling jade-colored dress a king might have gifted his queen, come another spring.

  She smiled dreamily at me, this marble-skinned woman, showing her fangs, and the terror in my heart was so great that I began to shake. Deranged thoughts raced through my mind: this is the queen the true white queen and up till now whatever we imagined about the world our world their world was a mote of dust licking its own tail in the tiniest sliver of light unaware of the biting dark stretched endless around it.

  The pale woman jerked her head away. The spell broke. I wobbled and fell to the floor, hugging my chest. The Lady of the Stone kissed Shafi’s neck. Her lips parted and a torrent of sharp teeth, like nails from a nail gun, drove into his flesh.

  Shafi never uttered a sound. Instead he closed his eyes, sighed, and began to pant.

  He never stopped panting.

  Even as his skin gurgled and fell away; as the venom softened him, reshaped his flesh, melted his face. As her legs fused at his back and her skin began to shed, a diamond-patterned second skin emerged from beneath. Her fingernails flailed, tore at Shafi, flayed him, unhooking his flesh from its burdensome wrapping, as the toxin congealed his blood and plugge
d the gashes. Her teeth and fingers roved and split, peeled and stretched, so that, when she was done, Hakim Shafi was a pillar of clotted blood and liquefied bone pulsating with each beat of his encased heart.

  The snakewoman paused. She examined her handiwork, angled her head, and opened her jaws. Wide, wider, stretch, expand, until her maw was a black gullet around which flared her spectacled, ribbed hood. Her mouth crackled and thrust and wrapped around Hakim’s bubbling head. His eyelids were gone, his pupils dull, and I saw he was still trying to smile.

  Sahib, I . . . I cannot go on.

  I need to breathe. I cannot breathe.

  • • • •

  Inspector sahib, you sit there, smug.

  You’re thinking to yourself that, at last beyond any shred of doubt, you know that this junkie, this peddler, this heroinchi, is mad.

  A raving lunatic who murdered Hakim Shafi and secreted his body someplace so you never found it. You say to yourself, a little more, just a little more nonsense out of him for the Poison Men, and you can wrap it up and call it a night. Cold iron bars for the maniac with rats and vermin for company, and a warm bed for you and the sub-Inspector, with perhaps your wives pressing your sore legs before you fall asleep.

  You are wrong.

  I know this now, sahib: Our world is not our own, it is borrowed. Sometimes it is shared and occasionally it’s taken and reshaped against the will of its possessors, but always briefly.

  We heroinchies were mistaken. We are neither lovers nor children of the white queen. The real children of the true white queen are hidden, a tribe of men and women who have infiltrated our puny civilization. They lurk in shadows and come forth only at the call of their mistress.

  Which is why I did what I did. Why I didn’t flee when they came out from the darkness that night, although I was terrified and half out of my mind. As the spawn of the white queen surged from the depths of that cavern, a tide of venomous children rushing toward the smoking pillar of blood that used to be Hakim Shafi, it came together in my head, and I realized my true purpose at last. I understood why God or whatever force it was saved me the night I died in the park.

  The snakewoman’s translucent children licked and ripped and gorged on the lower half of Hakim Shafi; he was already waist-deep inside their mother’s maw. As his blood steamed, they chased the crimson smoke with their spade-shaped mouths and muzzles. They followed the blood vapors with their snouts and lapped the condensate. Their smacking, slurping sounds filled the green-lit cave and they pulled and dragged Hakim away, their mother still riding his head.

  It took all my will to creep forward and grab the rosewood box when they were gone. It was slick with blood and slime. I tottered and nearly fell across the yards of snakeskin molted across the cavern’s floor: a squamous, gory, leathery thing that twitched like a lizard’s tail.

  Trembling, I reached out and fingered its coiled edges. As the green light from the gravestone fell on it, the snakeskin blossomed, and etchings suddenly burst onto its surface: strange geometric patterns, jagged whorls, spiraling curlicues and scripts. An enchanted map borne of the white queen’s inhuman flesh. A primeval cosmos unfurled like a lotus dipped in blood. How the light made those secrets glow! Their mysteries burned into my eyes so everywhere I looked the universe was naked and serpentine, the light of the snake pearl limning those mysteries; and when I looked down, I saw the minuscule particles of my own skin shedding as I became something new and never known before.

  I gasped at the enchantment, trying to understand it. The light twitched and the snakewoman’s hum wrapped around me. Love me, it said, Love me. Stay with me. I shall show you sights beauteous and teach you ways of embracing your astonishment. Worship me and you shall never want again, dream again, fear again. Not even your little boy.

  And then there were too many faces in the cavern. They dripped from the ceiling, they draped the floor, they licked with blackened tongues the wounded skin of their mother. They poured down, and I dropped the snakeskin. They swarmed around me, dead and lolling, and I screamed.

  Clutching the rosewood box, I whirled and ran. Back the way I came, up the dark corridor leading into this den of quietus, the domain of the Lady of the Stone with her green gem shining like a murderous beacon.

  Before I fled into the tunnel, I turned for one last look and saw what I had thought was a cave was really an ossuary. The walls were lined with skulls and bones, and the wetness of the granite was damp moss flourishing on snakeskins tautened across this ossified legion.

  • • • •

  A yellow moon sickled the night clouds when I stumbled out from the postern door. Somewhere a cock crowed.

  I gripped Hakim’s box and ran across the brick path through the shrine’s towers.

  The qawwals and their audience were gone. Brass bowls, bottles, used needles, and crushed joints lay scattered where the stage was. I lurched between the cemented graves filled with sinners, my eyes aching with what I had seen. My stomach heaved. I think at one point I vomited on a grave, yanking at weeds and cemetery dandelions to wipe my mouth. Then I got up and labored onward, onward, until my lungs were on fire, and I collapsed on the banks of Uch Lake.

  I must have lain there for hours. I dozed and dreamed, and in my dreams the river and the lake and all the oceans of the world were nothing but giant blue snakes wrapped around the earth. The moon and the sun were their alien eyes, the horizon the burning mottled flare of their hood supporting the heavens. Like the towers that raised the dome of Bibi Farida.

  I thought of the maestro Tariq Khan and his band of qawwals and the town of Uch and the townsfolk. I thought of the little pale children I had seen at Hakim’s house and on my journey into the queen’s realm. Who watched Hakim? Who watched us all? I lay curled like a fetus and dreamed fetal dreams; and at some point I woke and went to the water and drank and opened the rosewood box. From it I took Shafi’s venom boxes, mixed the powders, and tossed fistfuls of them into the docile lake. Coppery-red and black smoke drifted in the wind, blown across the lake’s surface, and I thought again of Shafi’s steaming offal billowing from the pillar of his petrified blood.

  When the tins were empty, I looked inside the box and saw the sandstone necklace Shafi’s wife had left behind. I counted the stones and flung them into the lake as well. I went back to the guesthouse, where I gathered Shafi’s things, called a taxi, and left the wretched town of Uch. I had enough money to be taken to Sangchoor, a nearby town, and there, in a shabby motel, I hid and waited.

  Two days later, news came that a hundred people, including a band of qawwals, had sickened from a mysterious epidemic in Uch. Five days later, the papers said, traces of potent poisons were found in the blood of some who died. Foul play was suspected.

  A week later, the children of the white queen came for me.

  It was a river of faces that flowed inside the walls of my motel room. I glimpsed them in the ceiling cracks, heard their chatter in the eaves, felt them thump against the windowpane. One night the torrent rushed at the glass, hit, and broke into a million poisonous children; tiny-limbed, gelid, and familiar. They exhaled fog on the glass. They wore faces that dissolved and reemerged. Last night, they came for me again, and . . . and sahib, I was done. I was utterly exhausted.

  Which was why, I finally decided to come to your police station.

  • • • •

  This is my story, sahib. Of a heroinchi courting a third death.

  I see by both your and the sub-Inspector’s eyes that you don’t know which part to believe. That I am mad and tried to murder a hundred people, half of them children, or that under the shrine of Babi Farida, there breathes a different life. The paradox of my insanity doesn’t nullify either truth.

  I am so cold, sahib. So cold. Just look at my arms; have you ever seen such hideous discoloration, such scales? I know what Hakim Shafi would say: I touched his poisons with my bare hands, but that is not it. Already I can feel my fingers shriveling, the skin becoming thick and cracked abo
ve the knuckles. Sometimes I have difficulty chewing, as if my jaws have become too big for my meals. My teeth feel so pointed they appear suited for entirely different purposes now. I would go to a doctor, but which antidote would they give me? I handled hundreds of those poisons, I handled her dead skin, and, well, only like can heal like. Her skin.

  One was a hidden treasure that needed to be discovered. A goddess returned to her people.

  I see your eyes. You think I killed them both, Shafi and her.

  You’re standing up. Of course. You have to hand me over to the Poison Men. I do wonder how they found me this quickly. Perhaps a phone call from you? But how did you know I was wanted by them? How did the Police Inspector of Sangchoor know gangland members from the big cities wanted me?

  I also wonder why their shadows look bloated and misshaped when they pass the window. Why they seem to be holding some kind of drum under their arms. It almost looks like a tabla.

  In my mind, it’s so difficult to keep everything in order. I keep returning to the song the Serpent Queen sang. It warbles in my head, it whips my bones. Perhaps, I shall hear it when they slice my throat. Her words—they come to me in my dreams, buried in that hissing cacophony. Magic words, ancient words, shards of glass in an ambrosial meal:

  “I live in your soul’s crevices. I have lived forever there.

  Like a moth to dancing light you’ll come; I will prepare

  to skewer you with my arrow, to noose my hair locks flung.

  I’ll whip out my tresses, grin and show:

  dead lovers on each blade

  hung.”