Joseph Lewis: Chimera

“Because it’s about his mother.”

“What about her?”

“How she died.” Chandra covered his eyes. “It’s my fault that she’s dead. It’s my fault that they’re all dead.” After a moment, he looked up though he avoided her eyes and he said, “My wife hated living here, so far from her family and friends. She was lonely, and sometimes scared being so close to the road like this. She was terrified of being robbed for some reason, even though we had nothing worth stealing. She pestered me for years to move back to the village. I don’t think she believed me that the grasses made me sick. Either that or she thought a man shouldn’t let such a thing force him out of his home. I refused to move, so she left and she took Naveen with her. He was still very small then. As he grew older, he started to come out here to help me with the house and garden. We hunted birds together, back when there were birds to hunt. Even when he was small, he was a good hunter. Sharp eyes and sharp ears. And he can be very quiet when he wants to.

“One day while we were in the forest, I found a man peeing on a rock. His clothes were ragged and filthy, but he had a sword on his belt and a helmet on his head. The soldier saw me before I could run, but I waved Naveen back and he hid in the trees behind me,” Chandra said. “At first I thought the soldier was going to kill me where I stood. He spoke Persian. I had no idea what he was saying, but I recognized the sound of the language from travelers I had met on the road. He came toward me, his hand on his sword. But then he spoke in Hindi, though not very well. He wanted to know if there were people nearby. He wanted food and water.”

“What did you say to him?”

Chandra shrugged, his eyes dull and lifeless. “I was going to say no, but then I thought of how terrified my wife would be at the sight of this man wandering through her precious little village. I thought it might change her mind, and that she and Naveen would come back home to me. So I said yes. I pointed the soldier toward the village and he nodded, but he went off in the wrong direction. So I stayed with Naveen in the trees to wait and be sure that he was gone before we went home. And then he returned, leading a whole troop back through the woods toward the village. We watched them go past. I didn’t know what to do. I told myself that it would be all right. They just wanted food and then they would be on their way. They didn’t kill me, after all. So I took Naveen home and waited.”

“And the village?”

He shook his head and covered his eyes again, his shoulders shaking, his voice cracking as he said, “An hour later, everyone was dead.”

Asha looked away to the north, to the edge of the bamboo forest where the aether mist was seeping out into the sunlight. “And Naveen doesn’t remember what happened?”

“No. And I couldn’t tell him. I just couldn’t. I can’t.”

“I believe you love your son,” she said. “So I won’t tell him the truth, and I won’t tell you to tell him the truth either. But it would be better for you both to leave this place and find a new home.”

Chandra nodded. “You’re right. But I can’t move him like this. He’s too sick.”

“He’s not sick,” Asha said. “He’s possessed.”

The man stared at her. “That’s ridiculous.”

“It’s not and he is. His high temperature, the racing pulse, the sensitivity to light and sound, and the strange things he’s saying. I’ve seen this before. He’s possessed.”

“By a ghost?” Chandra looked back at the house. “By a ghost of someone who died in the village?”

“No. By the ghosts of everyone who died in the village. All of them.” Asha sniffed. “I’ve never seen a heart rate like his, beating so fast you can barely hear the individual beats at all. If we don’t stop it soon, his heart will fail completely and he’ll die.”

“You have to help him! Isn’t there something you can do?”

Asha slipped another long sliver of ginger into the corner of her mouth. “Maybe. How do I find the village?”

It was a long hour’s walk along a seldom-used path through the forest down to the bottom of the valley. As Asha descended the trail she felt the air grow steadily cooler and the white mist swirling around her feet brushed her skin with a sharp chilling caress. The path itself was carpeted in brown bamboo leaves. Here and there a long slender branch lay across her way, and from time to time she found a young bamboo shoot in the center of the trail, some of them as high as her shoulder.

She walked softly, pausing every few steps to listen to the vast stillness around her.

Still nothing.

Still no birds, no crickets, no anything.

Eventually the trees thinned and parted. Asha stepped out onto the edge of a grassy field dotted with large gray stones and ancient cracked stumps. Fifty paces away she saw the brown line of a dry stream bed running from east to north along the valley floor. And everywhere she looked stood the broken remains of bamboo homes.

The houses closest to her still bore the black marks from the aborted fire, but the wind and rain had torn off most of the roofs long ago and the wooden slats and poles of the walls were cracking, sliding, and hanging away from the buildings on their slow journey into decay and oblivion.

As she moved through the village, she saw through the doorways the irregular mounds of earth that she took to be the graves that Chandra had mentioned.

After a few minutes in the village, a sound seeped into her right ear that wasn’t the whisper of the wind or the rustle of the bamboo leaves. It was a deep, soft rumbling like distant thunder, only it had the regular ebb and flow of a tide, like breathing. Asha recognized it and she felt her own pulse quicken. She gripped the strap of her bag tightly in her sweating hands.

She eased around the corner of another collapsing house and found the bear sitting on the roof of a small shack chewing on a thin branch bearing a handful of pale yellow flowers.

“A sloth bear.” She grimaced. “Perfect.”

The animal was tall but thin, its long fur standing up at wild angles, its long slender muzzle licking and chewing on its stick. Against the pale blue sky, the bear’s black fur created a sharp silhouette high on the shack’s roof and the narrowness of the bright white chevron across its chest showed her all the more clearly how starved the animal was.

Asha stood very still and very quiet. The bear was facing her but she couldn’t be certain it had seen her yet, though it would only be a matter of moments before it smelled her. She knew that sloth bears ate fruit and insects and they hunted at night, normally. But she also knew that on rare occasion they were known to fight tigers, and to fight packs of dholes, and even to attack armed men. And sometimes they won.

When the bear dipped its head to bite a fresh part of its branch, Asha stepped back smoothly into the shadow of the house behind her, backing away faster and faster to put more distance between them. With two crumbling buildings between her and the bear and still no sign that she had been seen, she slowed down and breathed a long deep breath. Then she turned to circle back to the trail through the forest and stumbled over a pole that had fallen from a nearby wall. She fell to all fours with the pole snapping and cracking beneath her knees.

Behind her, the sloth bear snorted, grunted, and roared.

Asha ran. She didn’t dare make for the trail now. In the narrow corridor between the bamboo walls there would be no place to hide and she couldn’t hope to outrun the bear. Instead she bolted down the hillside, following the dry stream bed north along the edge of the village and down across a wide grassy field strewn with large round stones.