Eric Brown - The Serene Invasion

“You miss him, Ana. Oh, I know how much you miss him. My little spies… Rajeev, Kallif…” He smiled. “They tell me all about your dreams of the day when Bilal will return…”

She had wondered about Rajeev and Kallif, where they disappeared to for days on end, suddenly reappearing with rupees and bags of barfi.

“What do you know about Bilal?” she asked.

His eyes twinkled. “Take off your clothes, Ana, and let me see the perfection of your little body.”

“Tell me what you know about Bilal!” she demanded. “Where is he? Is he alive?”

“Oh, he is very much alive, Ana, alive and prospering.”

She felt hope beyond hope, even if it was being granted her from the mouth of a monster.

“How do you know this?”

“I have my spies, Ana, my informants.”

“Where is my brother?” she demanded.

“He is alive and well, but he will have forgotten his little sister, long ago.”

“No! No, Bilal would never forget me. Never…”

Sanjeev laughed. “Then why haven’t your dreams come true, Ana? Why hasn’t he returned to rescue you from a life of thieving and beggary?”

She shook her head, crying openly now, past all shame. “I don’t know,” she said in a tiny voice. “Please, tell me…”

“Bilal left Kolkata,” he said, amazing her. “He was plucked off the streets by the representatives of an agency which educates street kids like yourself. Eventually, according to my sources, he left India and was taken to America.”

But why didn’t he come for me…? she wanted to ask.

“Now, Ana,” Sanjeev wheedled. “Please take off your filthy t-shirt and shorts.”

She pressed herself against the wall and shook her head.

“Would you prefer the stick, Ana? Would you like me to take you the hard way?”

She wanted to lash out at him, push his fat bulk so that he fell over and bashed his head on the marble floor, but she was paralysed with fear.

Sanjeev raised the stick and Ana winced and closed her eyes.

A second passed, then two, three…

An agonising eternity seemed to elapse.

She peeped out between her fingers, which she had raised to protect her face.

Sanjeev appeared to be frozen, the stick high above his head. His eyes bulged and his fat arm shook with the effort of attempting to bring the stick down. She wondered if he were having a heart attack.

To her left was a shuttered window. She summoned all her courage and made a decision. She ducked beneath Sanjeev’s raised arm, ran to the window and pulled it open, knowing that it would be barred. Her heart leapt when she saw not bars but a flimsy fly-screen. She reached out to steady herself — and her hand touched something soft on the table. The pile of expensive clothing…

As Sanjeev gasped behind her, wheezing as he turned and attempted yet again to hit her with his stick, she kicked out at the fly-screen and, as it shuddered and fell out from the window frame, she grabbed the clothing and leapt through the open window.

She was in the riotous garden surrounding the house. She hesitated, looking right and left. Sanjeev’s strangled cry from inside the house galvanised her into action. She gained her bearings and stumbled to her left, through fronds and ferns towards what she hoped was the garden gate. Seconds later she came to the concrete path. To her left the front door of the house was still shut. She turned right and sprinted to the gate, reached it and hauled on the circular, wrought iron handle. She heard the door open behind her and an explosion of outraged cries.

The heavy gate opened slowly and Ana dived through, turned right down the alley and ran like the wind.

A minute later she came to the main road and the surging crowd, and with elation swelling in her chest she threw herself into the flow of humanity and allowed herself to be carried away to safety.

TWILIGHT CAME DOWN swiftly across the city and Ana made her way to Maidan Park.

She would lie low for a few days, allow perhaps a week or so to elapse before she returned to the station. Sanjeev would have his men on the lookout for her, eager to exact his revenge. To her knowledge no one taken into Sanjeev’s lair had emerged without giving him what he wanted, and many a child had met their deaths by denying him.

Perhaps, she thought, she should leave the city altogether?

And what he had told her about Bilal? Had her brother really, truly left the city, been educated and taken to America? But why would Sanjeev have lied about such things? Why would he have told her that he had been educated and taken to America — unless it were true?

Perhaps, she thought, something had stopped Bilal from coming back for her. Perhaps, one day, soon, he would do just that.

She came upon a crowd of excited rich people pointing into the sky, where the light of the emerging stars seemed dulled, and the sun, on the horizon, was bloated to fully twice its size.

She thought of Prakesh, and hoped that Station Master Jangar had let him off with a warning and a minor beating, and thrown him from the station. She searched the park, but found neither Prakesh nor any of her friends.

She slipped into the shrubbery where a few months ago she had concealed a bedroll she had found in a skip. Now she curled up on it and, using the silken clothing she had stolen from Sanjeev’s room as a pillow, settled down to sleep.

She was listening to the sound of the city, the roar of distant traffic, the tragic hoots of the trains, when suddenly all noise seemed to stop — and a sudden, eerie silence reigned. Above her, the branches of a tree, formerly moving back and forth against the moon, were still.

Then she was asleep, or assumed she was asleep, though it had come upon her suddenly, and she was visited by a strange dream — but not the usual one of vicious policemen and angry station masters.

She was lying on her back on… No, not on anything, but floating in a grey mist. She felt naked, and she thought she should be frightened, but a calming voice in her head told her not to be afraid. The odd thing was, the voice was not her own.

She tried to struggle, but she was paralysed. All she could move was her eyes; all she could see was the grey mist… and something in the distance, the head and shoulders of a man or woman, watching her in silence.

Then she felt something dancing on her chest, and swivelled her eyes to look down her body. What she saw sent a jolt of alarm through her. There was a big spider down there, on her belly and climbing slowly towards her head, a spider with long legs as silver as the cutlery in the Howrah station restaurant.

She wanted to scream, but could not make the sound.

The spider approached her, its limbs tickling her chest. Then it was crawling over her chin, her face. It paused, pulsing slowly up and down, above her forehead.

She felt something touch the skin of her brow, as if the spider were applying a tikka mark to the centre of her forehead. She felt pressure then, and wondered if the spider was pushing something into her head.

She closed her eyes, and the voice in her head told her to be calm.

Seconds later she felt the spider skitter back down the length of her body. She tried to sit up but could not.

She awoke suddenly, and then did sit up.

She was in the bushes in the park, on the bedroll with the new clothes she had snatched from Sanjeev’s room. She remembered what had happened there, how she had escaped.

Her thoughts were interrupted by something in the bushes to her right.

She turned, gasping. She made out a golden glow, and a shape that was in some way familiar.

A figure was seated in the bushes perhaps three metres from her, and she recognised its head and shoulders from her dream.