Frank De Felitta - For Love of Audrey Rose

“The group from the ashram are in the first village. The village is in the valley. When the rain comes, the village will drown.”

“But I have to go there!”

“My officer says no. It is a bad idea.”

“My husband is there!”

“There is nothing I can do.”

The sergeant walked away. Janice ran after him.

“What if I disobey your officer and go?” she called.

“You will drown.”

“How can you be so sure?”

The sergeant looked at her, fatigued, bored with her, and eager to get some sleep.

“Every year the village drowns,” he said. “I told you, they are like baboons. Like children.”

As the sergeant turned, Janice shouted after him.

“What will you do to me if I go?”

He shrugged. “Bury you,” he said.

Dismayed, Janice walked back to the two trucks. They were empty. Blocks had been placed around the tires. The compound looked deserted. She walked back toward the huts where the soldiers slept. She found the sergeant coming back from the latrine.

“I am going down,” she told him. “Tonight.”

The sergeant sighed, then shrugged. “The road continues down the mountain. Follow it.”

“How far?”

“Two miles.”

“All right, then. I’m going. May I leave my suitcase?”

“As you wish.” Janice shivered. Her own bravado began to sound hollow. Nevertheless, she had come too far only to find another empty village, a place where Hoover had been. By now, he might have heard from a pilgrim, stopping at the Tejo Lingam ashram that an American woman was looking for him. Perhaps Mehrotra had been able to reach him in some way. He might be in Benares, or back at the ashram, looking for her. Or he might be over the mountain. Or he might be dead.

The road was tricky to follow, since she had no light. She also felt like a fool. India was full of tigers, as everybody knew. India was full of poisonous snakes. India was full of rebels and scorpions and panthers. But it seemed so unreal. There was only the night, and the hard, baked road that she sensed out of the corner of her eye, leading down, going around curves through the scrub brush and dry earth. India also had monsoons. Her imagination began to conjure images of walls of water, islands of houses swimming around, sucked under in great whirlpools.

“Come on,” she whispered. “Get hold of yourself.”

After half an hour the vegetation at the side of the road had become dense. She was soaked through with sweat, and she knew she was grimy from head to toe. She thought she heard rain. She stopped. Nothing. The leaves of unknown bushes throbbed in a crosscurrent of chilly and warm winds.

An hour passed, and she began to wonder if the sergeant had really known how far the village was. Clods of dark clay crumbled under her broken sandals. She felt too frightened to turn around and go back. She cursed herself for being such a fool as to end up in a strange country, on a dark road, waiting for the thunderstorm. It was like a fate that she had relentlessly pursued since the day she landed in India. Well, finally she had caught up with it.

She passed a deserted hut. Then a second. Debris littered the fields, dry and broken, where nothing seemed to grow but dead stalks. The debris meant the village was near. She peered into the darkness, but saw nothing but the road. It was so dark she had to feel her way, her foot scraping at the clay that meant the road.

Another half hour passed, and a third hut, this one with a donkey outside, and babies crying inside. Janice paused. The road branched suddenly into a fork. Standing in the middle of the road, she heard a strange, laughing yell. It sounded like an insane dog. Her heart beating almost out of control, she walked quickly down the right branch. After ten minutes a light bobbed into view, then another. Janice almost wept as the fear evaporated. She stumbled down into the main village, which was only five small buildings and two broken-down sheds. Bottles were littered all over the ground. There was no river in this valley. It was deathly silent, now that the dogs were quiet. Only the incoming wind hissed over the cracked piles of dirt in the fields.

Thunder boomed nearby. It was barely a mile away. The echoes died very slowly. Janice walked through the village, but all the lights were off. It was well past midnight. She was afraid to knock on any door that was closed.

She would have to wait until the morning before she could spot the orange robes of the monks and, hopefully, Elliot Hoover.

Janice peered into the first shack with an open door. Something slithered rapidly across the dirt floor. It occurred to her that body warmth would attract snakes. She walked to the second shack. It was evil-smelling but it looked cleaner. Heat lightning flared over the horizon, casting its soft glare onto the boxes and metal bolts and nails on the floor. She went in and lay down on a pile of empty canvas bags, neatly folded.

The night was endless. There was no possibility of sleep. Elliot Hoover was certainly in the next hut, or in the field she had passed, or sleeping with the animals at the edge of town. She thought of Bill, probably strapped in his bed. She wondered if Dr. Geddes would consider her as insane as Bill. It would not occur to him that half the world believed as Bill did, as she almost did, having come to believe stronger and stronger since seeing Benares. But what was the use? Bill was not in Benares. He was on Long Island. On Long Island they put you away for too many religious ideas. Or at least for acting on them.

She fastened upon one consoling thought: Elliot Hoover would know exactly what to do. Janice prayed the night would pass swiftly, that she would finally find him before the dew was dry.

Janice lay on the canvas sacks and stared upward at a bare electric wire. The filaments dangled in tiny radiating circles. Lightning flashed behind her back, shot through the cracks and holes of the far wall, and made her silhouette leap out in front of her eyes. Rain was falling. It came without an interruption of sound, a steady drumroll on the roof. The air was cold and wet.

Something cold grazed her cheek. She screamed, bolted upright, and saw a dark trickle flinging itself down from the roof crossbeam. She stood up and dragged the canvas bags to the other side of the floor and lay down miserably again. Instantly the canvas bags were soaked. Janice moved to the far corner, sat down on the dusty floor, and disconsolately watched a large puddle form around the sacks. The thin trickle of water had widened to a black stream thudding into the dirt floor.

“Jesus Christ,” she whispered.

Just then a chunk of mud fell from the roof beams. A column of water roared into the room, and with it the cold of the predawn. Janice stood as though afraid of the watery intruder and stared at the floor turning into mud. She backed against the wall. That wall was also wet, oozing the monsoon rain like cold sweat. When she looked up, she saw the roof beams bending down, weirdly elastic, sagging toward the floor.

Janice ran to the door. As her hand touched the doorjamb, the roof caved in. It was like being on a ship that was breaking up. Waves of water billowed down, flung by roaring black winds. The night thundered its storm, a horror of death in a steady, roaring imprecation.

“Oh God!” Janice called, her voice unheard in the roar.

The water was already ankle deep. The canvas sacks and boxes were floating, nudged back and forth by the storm. Bits of debris from the walls and corner supports bobbed at her feet. Overhead Janice saw a clear track of lightning, a perfect forked tongue of livid white against massed black sky. There was no roof anymore.

Janice stood under the doorjamb. Beyond the door was the dirt road and the village, and small palm trees driven down under the weight of the rain. The mud in the village was moving, carrying dead animals, rusted cans and vague shapes that looked like corpses.